The Mathematics of Absence

How do you measure what isn't here? The space between two heartbeats, a formula with only the empty side of equals.

Each silence has weight— the air that held your voice now holds nothing, dense as lead, light as the breath before you speak again.

I count the ways you're gone: the steps I don't take toward rooms you won't enter, the words I edit out of letters that arrive unsigned.

Absence is geometry. A line drawn from then to now stretches infinite, divides everything I had by the hours since you left.

What remains are remainders— the decimal that never closes, proof that even subtraction cannot make anything whole.