When prayer feels like going through the motions
God stays near while the feeling of nearness is gone. The Qur'an puts this as a fact about where God is, and how last night's prayer went does not move it: "indeed, I am near", and of every human being, "we are closer to him than his jugular vein". The gap you are noticing sits in the heart, and scripture treats that as a real condition with its own history.
Hearts going quiet over time is something the Qur'an describes openly. One verse asks whether the moment has come for hearts to soften again, then names what happened to communities before: "the age stretched long over them, so their hearts hardened". Long stretches of unexamined living do that to people. The hardening is spoken of as ordinary and reversible, which is why it arrives as a question.
Prayer being heavy is part of the record too. Where the Qur'an tells people to seek help through patience and prayer, it adds that this is hard "except for those who are humble before God". Standing there with a wandering mind, saying words that land flat, is a common condition of belief. Many people who love their religion pray this way for months at a stretch.
Part of what dims a connection is ordinary crowding. Wealth and children are the examples one verse gives for what pulls attention away from remembrance, which is a telling choice: the distractions named are good things, the ones a decent life is built from. Work, phones, tiredness and money worry do the same job now.
What the Qur'an offers back is small and repeatable. Prayer is given as the thing that holds remembrance in place, remembrance is where hearts settle, and one early revelation closes with the instruction to "Prostrate, and draw near." None of it asks you to feel something first. If the silence you are hearing is the silence after asking, verses about unanswered dua sit close to this; if getting back to the prayer itself is the hard part, see verses about prayer.