The Geography of Absence

Dust settles on the shelf where your coffee cup still rests, a ring of forgotten mornings dark as sediment in still water.

The light through the window catches its rim— a small halo around nothing, and I understand how absence has its own geography, its own weight.

Something in the way the dust moves through the beam of sun reminds me that everything holds a kind of memory— not in words, but in the space where presence used to live, in the shape the hand remembers even when the hand is gone.