Anatomy Of Absence

Absence wounds in such a way that is too thorny to commit into the nakedness of familiar words. Neither Science nor Logic can decode its cryptic verses; Apparatuses cannot measure its degree in thresholds, yet you feel its existence. You suffer its presence when everything starts to cave in and only the nearness of a yearned name could dispel your vast constellations of voids.

Call it a hunger, a malaise, an affliction, an ailment in which no one is immune. It is the cornerstone of smouldering yearning; of petty, blinding jealousy; of wanting too much that it hurts.

How can you describe the anguish that shadows its arrival? How can you justify your freefall into undignified depths of being too needful? How should you deal with muted gaps which intensify your great deprivation? Or how should you reconcile with the thought that you are not missed in the same way you toss and turn in the hollowed spaces of profound vacancy?

Missing a much-loved is an affront to your self-sufficiency. Your memory-triggers dilate and everything liquefies and carried away into unconscious soft whispers of the truant’s treasured scents. The mere fact that you cannot bear even a slender departure ignites emptiness too overwhelming to contemplate. Your heart constricts and your restlessness swells into oceans.

Wistfulness descends upon you and you conceal your wretched, intimate poverty with premeditated missent messages. There is no rationality to this business, this sending deliberately ‘unintended’ sms. You just have to, because every breathing nerve of your pining self tells you so. You revel in slow-burning ache while waiting for a response, suspended between anticipation and regret. Getting a reply, with due explanation of its erroneous reception, prompts a birth of smile. Delayed or non-response propagate the most unreasonable dawn of flaming suspicions and resentments.

Such is your misery. Such is your fond wish that missing someone badly can be abolished by anything mortal.

Such is your fervent desire, and your immense discontent. Because even if the beloved is away you do not cease on loving. Because the insinuation of reunion wipes all lingering twinges of sorrow. Because proximity is a reward itself.

Because just being in the same room, silent and breathing together, is reason enough.