The Architecture of Absence
Before
The Sunday crossword spread across the kitchen island
Steam rising from two cups
Your place at the table, earned through
ten thousand small rituals
IMPACT
Club to skull.
The world
tilts
sideways
and you're tasting iron on your tongue,
concrete cold against your cheek,
brain scrambling for coordinates
in a geography that no longer
exists.
The Room Breathes
Cold exhales where warm light once lived.
You know this space like a lover's skin.
Every switch, every creak, every shadow
that danced at 3 AM.
Now:
nothing
nothing
nothing
The absence has weight.
Forty-seven pounds of missing couch.
Eighteen pounds of vanished bookshelf.
The exact heft of a life
subtracted.
phantom refrigerator hum
ghost of brewing coffee
echo of your own laughter
from when laughter meant something
The Fight
You rise, shaking,
prowling through the hollow
for the thing that struck you down.
Your fists clench around air.
Rage is a loaded gun
with no target,
just the kick
that bruises your own shoulder.
The void swallows your fury
like it swallowed everything else.
Even your anger
doesn't belong here.
The Settling
Self-doubt seeps upward
through the floorboards
like groundwater through concrete.
You deserved this.
You built this.
This is all you've ever been.
The thoughts arrive
with the weight of inheritance,
passed down through generations
of small failures
you've been cataloging
since childhood.
Depression finds the key
to the lock
you didn't know you'd given it
Recognition
The empty room stops feeling
like a crime scene.
It feels like
honesty.
Like the physical manifestation
of what you've always been.
A space where things
used to live.
You stop fighting the cold floor
and let it teach you
the architecture of absence,
the blueprints
of becoming nothing.
The Sunday crossword, half-finished
Steam rising from one cup
Your place at the table
earned through ten thousand
small rituals
of forgetting
how to stay
Loved this. Greetings from Albuquerque