Opening Passage

I woke this morning to the geometry of absence - how it fills rooms like morning light, how it maps itself across consciousness in ever-widening circles. Types of gone, I thought, watching dawn paint shadows on the wall. There are so many ways of leaving, each with its own texture, its own shade of emptiness. Some departures whisper, others echo, but all leave their own particular silence behind.

In the first room, your shadow lingers-
a half-formed word upon the air,
like dust motes dancing in remembered light.
You are there, but not there:
the first lesson in vanishing.

Distance grows like twilight,
stretches between cities like mist,
each mile a deeper shade of leaving.
Your voice across the darkness
becomes starlight - distant, eternal.

Some absences have longitude,
marked in time zones and terminal gates,
in pixelated faces on screens
that freeze between heartbeats,
a glitch in the geography of belonging.

Others are measured in digital silence:
unread messages collecting dust,
notifications fading like old photographs,
your presence reduced to last seen
nine years ago, or was it yesterday?

The cruellest gone is the living kind:
passing like strangers in shared spaces,
eyes sliding past like rain on glass,
both there and not there -
quantum states of remembering.

Then there is the final absence,
the one that turns all tenses past,
where "is" becomes "was" becomes "were,"
and every memory transforms
into a different shade of forever.

Yet some things remain:
the way light falls through windows
at exactly your angle,
how certain songs still hold
the shape of your listening,
how rooms remember
long after they forget.

For all the different ways of leaving,
and the spaces that remain.