Friday evening kicks off a strange countdown. A friend asks what the week was like. Monday still feels close — there was that meeting, a bit of nervousness, faces in the elevator window.

Wednesday even sticks around: there was a phone call, somewhere I slipped up on a word and it was funny.

Tuesday… Tuesday is gone completely. Not just some details lost, but the whole day slipped past memory. Like the room was cleared out, leaving only empty walls.

At first, you think — maybe you just don’t try to remember. But no, it’s not about laziness or tiredness. The day did happen, the body moved on schedule, doors opened and closed as they should. Mail arrived, buttons were pressed in the right order.

Only inside — not a single point to hold on to. No print, no scratch.

Explanations come one after another. The brain saves attention on the same old stuff. Memory keeps only what’s new. Why remember a hundred identical stairwells? Makes sense — but it still feels cold knowing life is made of these purely technical days. Not bad days — just nothing days.

The worst part isn’t that something’s lost forever. It’s the steady chill of this forgetting.

Like missing the rainy season out in the countryside: you walk past windows and never get caught in a drop.

You look back and realize: there’ve been more than a dozen Tuesdays like this in the past months. Sometimes a whole month goes underwater. You try to catch even one memory of the weather or the taste of tea at lunch… Silence instead of a reply.

The whole stretch shrinks down to one color of a work screen or a patch of light in the hallway.

A simple excuse shows up: routine’s to blame! If only the day was brighter or packed with events… And sure — a couple of times I tried to squeeze more action into weekdays: back-to-back meetings, new cafes for a change of taste and photos for stories just in case.

For some reason, only one long tiredness by evening or the moment of snapping a bun with “new place” written on it sticks. Even breakfast disappears off screen.

It becomes a habit to make fake checkpoints — scrolling through a chat or looking at photo galleries: maybe something worth noticing? It feels like trying to prove to yourself the day existed through outside traces.

You remember the post — but not the life between posts.

And then there’s a turn: maybe an interesting life isn’t made of a chain of events? Maybe it’s all decided by one glance in the middle of a plain day? Suddenly you notice a shadow on the wall or a quick look on a passerby’s face. Seeing it once for real pushes out several hours of autopilot.

But then you slip back into the smoothness of invisible days.

You want to believe you lose the skill to see because you’re busy or tired too often… But it seems the reason’s simpler and way worse: you learned to let days slip through you so easily, you barely notice how they vanish from your own story.

And it gets awkward.

If I myself turned out to be a distracted watcher of my own life — who then will witness these vanished days?