THE TERRAIN OF ABSENCE
THE TERRAIN OF ABSENCE
I think I've finally understood why distance makes
love tremble like a flame held in strangers' palms ~
it isn't distrust that shakes it, no, but that concrete lack,
a hunger for the body, for air breathed in the same room,
a territory of absence with maps drawn on water,
where your name is a city I can no longer touch.
When you're near, I learn you instinctively, the way skin learns rain:
the way you go quiet before saying something important,
the faint tremor in your voice, like a spider's thread in the wind,
the shadow that crosses your face when you remember something old,
the gestures you make without knowing you're making them ~
I know you through evidence, not guesswork, I hold you in context.
But distance leaves white spaces, clearings without footprints,
and the mind has this cruel habit of filling them
with whatever it finds in its darkest pockets:
with versions, with mistranslated silences, with scenarios
grown overnight like mushrooms in the basement of thought,
and every silence of yours becomes a room without a door.
That's why I believe closeness makes love more certain ~
not because distance would shrink the love itself, as people think,
but because presence gives certainty a body, bones, weight,
a breath that confirms, a hand that signs
everything the soul says and cannot prove over the phone;
truth needs a temperature in order to be believed.
When I can't see you, all I have left is to believe, and faith is beautiful
and dangerous in equal measure, like a glass bridge over fog,
because there, exactly there, in the gap between believing and knowing,
uncertainty builds its nest, that white and greedy bird
that pecks at night along the edges of your face
until what's left is a love built only out of memory.
Maybe that's why long-distance love is a cult without an altar,
a prayer spoken to a window that never answers back;
and yet I wait, the way a field waits for the snow it was promised,
I stitch my days to one another like unopened letters,
and I tell myself that one morning you'll simply walk through the door,
and all the white spaces will fill, all at once, with you.
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