When He Became an Absence

When He Became an Absence

I do not remember
when our love began—

not precisely.

It did not arrive like lightning
or announce itself with spectacle.
It came the way breath comes—
quietly, inevitably—
until one day I realized
I had been living inside it
for years.

We did not fall in love.

We became it.

Decades passed
not as numbers
but as rituals:
your body beside mine
turning in sleep
as if drawn by some ancient tide,
two cups waiting in the morning
like a promise we never had to speak aloud.

We built a world
so slowly, so faithfully,
that I mistook it for permanence.

I mistook you for forever.

And then—

You were gone.

Not in fire,
not in some grand unraveling
that would give shape to the loss—

but in silence.

In a vanishing so complete
it felt impossible
even as I lived inside it.

No door slammed.
No final word was spoken
that could be held
or hated
or forgiven.

You simply stepped
out of the story
we had written together—

and left me here
to keep reading it alone.

At first,
I waited.

Of course I did.

Because love like ours
does not understand disappearance.
It understands distance,
delay,
even pain—

but not this.

Not the way a life
can be severed
without ceremony.

I listened for you
in everything.

In the imagined turn of a key
that never came,
in the echo of your voice
in rooms that had not yet learned
how to be empty.

Time did what time always does—
it continued.

Cruel, unremarkable, relentless.

It carried me forward
through days you would never touch again,
through seasons that arrived
without your witness.

I learned, slowly,
the geography of absence:

how every room still holds you
in its architecture,
how objects remember
what my hands cannot forget,
how silence can take on weight—
can press against the chest
like something living.

I still speak to you.

Not with my voice—
that would require a world
where you could answer—

but in the quiet places
where memory refuses
to obey reality.

I tell you things.

Small things.
Useless things.
The shape of my days,
the way the light falls now
through windows you once stood beside.

I update you
on a life
you are no longer part of.

And I do not know
if that is devotion
or madness
or simply what remains
when love has nowhere to go.

Because I am still yours.

That is the truth
no one knows how to hold.

You are not dead—
there is no grave
to kneel beside,
no ritual
to close this wound—

and yet
you are gone
in a way death itself
might have been kinder to name.

You have become
a living absence.

A shape in my life
that cannot be filled,
not by time,
not by reason,
not by the careful hands
of anyone who might try.

People tell me
I should move on.

As if I have not moved.
As if I have not been dragged
through the endless forward motion
of days that refuse
to return you to me.

They do not understand—

I am not holding onto you.

I am living
in what remains
after you.

And still—

God, still—

I love you.

Not the memory.
Not some softened version
time has made easier to carry.

I love you—

as you were,
as you are somewhere beyond me,
as you will never again be
within reach of my hands.

This is the epic
no one prepares you for:

Not the breaking—
but the continuation.

Not the end of love—
but its persistence
in a world
where it has no place left
to live.

And if there is any mercy
in all of this—

if anything of us
still matters—

I pray it is this:

That somewhere,
beyond time,
beyond whatever boundary
has taken you from me,

there exists a place
where I am not speaking
into silence—

where you turn,
as you once did in sleep,
drawn back to me
by something older than loss—

and for one impossible moment,

I am no longer
the only one
still here.