Absence

-“It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence”
-Mark Epstein
He wakes in the dull morning, the light filtering in through the window. He stares at the ray of light that slices through his room. Putting his hand in its stream he watches the light fill the creases of his palm. ‘What does it say,’ he wonders, remembering a co-worker he once had who always insisted that everything about you is written in the palm of your hand, in exactly those little creases that sometimes disappear in the sunlight.
There’s a shadow cast on the wall and he wonders if it has anything to do with the creases on his hand. Maybe the remnants of the past, still lingering. And he can vaguely make out the long wavy hair of someone who was once close to him, in the shadows. Names don’t seem to matter now; they’re all just part of a story. There’s no way to change it or modify it, it just is. There was a time, when he would pore over it and try and identify his missteps, but it would just fill him with an insufferable longing for a time that’s now past. Even as he stares at his hand, there’s no way he can trace those little lines back to when she was present. All that is left is a name that means nothing without a presence.
He stares at the ceiling awhile, where there is no shadow, just an empty white canvass and he wonders if it was in fact a waste, to have spent so many hours wishing for old paths to once again cross. After finding nothing on this canvass, he gives up. He stumbles out of bed and through the long narrow hallway to the freshly brewed pot of coffee. He sits with the cup of coffee, steaming, and stares at the window, watching the light bounce off the blinds and intimidate the shadows. They wax and wane, like a translucent ghost, dancing on his walls. The longer he stares, he can almost make out a body, but it quickly turns back to a formless shadow, waxing and waning in the light. When it is almost a body, he can faintly hear a giggling, which he almost recognizes from memory. Then it fades and he sits in the still sterile silence of his small one bedroom apartment. ‘She never liked it,’ he thinks, not knowing who he’s referring to. He raises the cup to his lips and breathes it in awaiting some discovery about its contents, but there is none. He leaves it, the black liquid swallowing the bouncing light.
Back through the hallway, he stands in the dim light coming in through the small window and stares at himself in the mirror. He almost catches a reflection, that is not his, but then it’s just him. He lets his clothes fall on the bathroom’s white tile floor, covered in the shadow of morning. Enters the shower and lets the water cascade over him. It’s cold, and the shower’s empty and somehow feels so much bigger than it has in his past. But he doesn’t use the extra space, he stands directly under the water and lathers and rinses and steps back onto the tiling. Walks through the shadows and dries himself quietly in front of the fan, his eyes closed. Then dried, sits on his bed and tries to remember a name that still has its presence, but they’re all empty, except for the girl he met last night. She wasn’t necessarily pretty and their conversation was mostly in itself a lull, but her name still has its presence, it’s not just a name, like the others.