I hardly saw it coming –
only the quiet way your absence began
reordering the small, familiar details.
Cups left on the counter,
a chair slightly angled away,
the faint echo of your laugh
lingering in corners where it no longer belonged.
I traced the paths of your disappearance
in the way sunlight hit the windows
and shadows pooled where we once lingered.
I remember how the sunlight used to fall
on the edge of your notebook,
how your pen left trails of thought across the page,
and how I thought I could read you
just by watching.
Now, the light still falls the same,
but the pages lie empty,
and I find myself learning
how to inhabit the quiet
that your presence once filled.
I feel the spaces you left
in the small rituals of the day –
the mug you never reach for,
the door left slightly ajar,
the hush that drapes itself over the rooms
where your laughter used to linger.
I am learning to trace these gaps,
to measure the weight of what is missing,
and in that quiet inventory
I begin to see the shape of myself
shifted, subtly,
by your absence.
I speak softly to the spaces you left behind,
tracing the echoes of your absence
in the small gestures I once took for granted.
And in that tracing, I feel both the weight of longing
and the subtle shape of myself,
learning to move through the quiet,
to recognize the hollow and the full alike,
and to carry both
as I walk through the days
you no longer inhabit.