Yesterday at 2:17 PM—I checked the time, twice actually—my head started doing that thing again. That collapsing-inward thing where my skull isn't a container anymore but a weight, pulling everything down into itself. I was staring at my screen. To read—or pretend to read, a PDF of Nietzsche's Gay Science was open—had been for who knows how long. The cursor blinking (lately I made my cursor pink to see better) at me like some accusatory eye. And I thought, without really thinking it in words: this must be what the end feels like.

Except it wasn't the end. It was just afternoon.

You know this already if you've ever worked at a desk or sat in a classroom or tried to exist between lunch and dinner. I tell you it's hard to survive this hour. That specific hour-ish stretch—call it 1 to 4, call it the dead zone, call it whatever you want—when your body just refuses. Your eyelids develop their own gravitational field. Reading becomes impossible. You look at a sentence and the words are there but they won't assemble into meaning. Someone could ask you what you're doing and the honest answer would be: barely hanging on. Hanging on to the precipice of the end of time.

Photo credit: Photo by Nicola Barts, Pexels.

But here's what I'm figuring out, after years of this daily dying—it's not about being tired. Or it is, but not the way we think. It's a losing freedom of siesta. The exhaustion isn't coming from outside. Bad sleep, sure. Too much coffee, probably. Fluorescent lights slowly murdering your circadian rhythm, absolutely. But that's not it. Not really.

The exhaustion is from maintaining yourself. From holding the shape of the person you're supposed to be. And by 2 PM that shape has started to break. Slowly first and after rapidly—it's become horror now, 2 PM horror.

I keep thinking about Cioran—this Romanian writer who couldn't sleep and turned insomnia into a philosophy. He wrote something once about consciousness being a disease. Everyone reads that and thinks: oh, another depressed European intellectual. Another guy who couldn't handle existence. But what if he was just describing afternoons? What if he was just paying attention to what happens when you've been awake too long and the machinery starts showing its seams?

Because that's the thing about 2 PM. It's when you stop being able to ignore the gap. The gap between you and yourself. Between the person sitting there and the person watching that person sit there. And somewhere in that watching-yourself-watch-yourself spiral, you run out of whatever fuel it takes to pretend this makes sense. In our parents' time, back then, they used to nap after lunch, gazing at nothing but the depth of nature's deep soul—observing beauty, having no rush to the day forward. That was a beauty of being human.

Mornings are easier. Mornings still have that story going—today might be different, today you might actually get somewhere, today the work might mean something beyond just filling hours until you can stop. You drink your coffee. You open your laptop. You have momentum or at least the memory of momentum. The gap between wanting to do something and doing it hasn't opened up yet.

But morning is a fiction we're all agreeing to believe in. I recall Oblomov now, lazy human of the history of literature. And the fiction holds until sometime after lunch, until that specific moment when it just... doesn't. When reality comes back. When you remember that you're exhausted—not from work but from being someone who looks like they're working. From keeping up the performance for others, for yourself, for nobody in particular. Oblomov took hours to get his feet on the ground after waking up from deep sleep. That was not being lazy or being-behind-to-modernity, but it was an actual human act of being authentic. We are not supposed to work day and night like slaves. We are animals by nature, so what does an animal do? Eat, sleep, and poop. That must be our life goal. But—

Heidegger had this word, Geworfenheit. Thrownness. The condition of already being somewhere you never chose to be, already in the middle of projects you don't remember starting. We mostly don't think about this. We're too busy. But at 2 PM the busyness fails. The projects show themselves as arbitrary. The goals lose their pull. And what's left is: this desk. This screen. This body that wants to stop. And this open screen full of PDFs.

I used to fight it. All the usual stuff—more coffee, walk around the apartment, splash cold water on my face, the small brutalities we commit to stay alert. Sometimes it worked enough. You'd push through. Get to evening. Feel like you'd won. But won what? Permission to do this again tomorrow? We are losing beauty every day in the name of being busy.

There's that scene in Solaris where Kris watches old footage of his father just standing in rain. Not doing anything. Just standing there getting rained on. And Tarkovsky holds on this for what feels like forever. Just a man in rain. And I understand something when I watch it because I realize: this is actually what life is. Not the forward motion we keep performing. Just standing. Being rained on. Time passing. I am just doing the same these days, rarely writing, rarely reading... after all it's just a waste of energy for nothing in return.

2 PM is when we become that man. When we stop moving—or stop pretending we're moving—and just sit there. Except we're at desks. Staring at screens. And the rain is just hours passing whether we're ready or not.

But what if—and this is where I lose the thread but maybe that's the point—what if the collapse isn't the problem? What if 2 PM is when we're actually seeing something true? When I was a child, national television used to show a 2 PM matinee show to make citizens sleep, maybe. It's not just my speculation but it's true—a lure to make them close windows and doors and sleep while watching that matinee show (especially movies). When all the machinery we use to avoid reality breaks down long enough for reality to get through?

And the reality is: we're exhausted. Not just tired. Exhausted from the whole thing. From pretending we're coherent. From acting like we're in control of our own minds. From maintaining that gap—the space between who we are and who we're performing—that gets wider every hour until we're on opposite sides of a canyon we can't cross.

Maybe death is the wrong word for what 2 PM feels like. Maybe it's more like that in-between state. Between sleeping and waking. Between one version of yourself and another. Between being Oblomov and not being Oblomov. Neither here nor there. Just suspended in the gap where nothing's expected because nothing's possible.

I wrote about horses once. About giving them the reins when you're too tired to steer anymore. And at 2 PM, when your hands are too heavy and your thoughts have scattered and your breath has gone shallow—you don't have a choice. You let go. You let something else drive. Your horse neighs in your ear so hard and says, "Let go, kid."

Which might be the lesson. Which might be what every afternoon has been trying to show us: that the surrender is the point. That running out of breath just means you're finally breathing. That the death-feeling at 2 PM isn't an ending but a space—the gap between one effort and the next, where something else can happen.

Or I'm just tired. It's 2 PM again right now, actually, and my skull is doing its collapse thing, and maybe none of this means anything except bodies get exhausted and consciousness is hard and time moves regardless.

But even saying that—even admitting it might all be meaningless—feels like putting down weight. Like finally letting the horses take over after all this time trying to steer.

The void is always there. At 2 PM we just stop pretending it isn't. We sit in it. We let it hold us. We stop fighting long enough to realize fighting was the problem.

And then, somehow, it's 3 PM. And the day keeps going. And you're still here.