The Presence of Absence

Invoking darkness and light on the most balanced day of the year.

I have spent the last four years living alone, yet through it all, I had a near-constant companion. It wasn’t a literal entity, but more of an emotion that I came to anthropomorphize: the presence of absence.

It has been with me almost as long as I can remember. The presence of absence is a palpable sense of longing: a yearning for something undefined and perpetually out of reach. It is a liminal space, simultaneously lodged in both the past and the future; nostalgia for a life I’ve never lived, for some alternate timeline. It is a constant state of what-if, defined by the people who are no longer here and the futures that might be mine, had I made different choices. It is loving the sadness, because it is familiar. 

The presence of absence was my first love; while it was a cruel partner, its familiarity brought a twisted form of comfort. It was the tragedy that played the leading role in my family lineage; that kept me always on the outside of my relationships, looking in, fearing being fully vulnerable. I couldn’t commit, because I was already partnered with the great and powerful thing that both was and was not there.

Whether by creating the distance myself or choosing partners who did it for me, I ensured that this shadow remained my closest relationship for most of my life. Both when single and coupled, I was always gazing out the window, a thousand miles off, longing for the hopelessly elusive. 

Last summer, I read Rob Bell’s beautifully locomotive meditation-slash-memoir, Everything is Spiritual, and one of the running callbacks was an eerily familiar refrain: presence in absence. It’s a subtle variation that speaks volumes. Bell, like me, partially uses this phrase to describe loss and pain: the spectre of death his father was running from, keeping him ever at a distance; driving him, like my father, to work relentlessly, lest he stop moving long enough to feel the hollowness in his chest. It’s a trait he inherited, just like I did, and it always catches up with you, because the body remembers everything we try to forget, storing up all that trauma until one day, the physical signs insist upon themselves.

Despite the similarities, the key difference between my catchphrase and Bell’s was the preposition. Mine was about dwelling on the loss; Bell’s is about showing up in spite of it, the celebration of the form over the negative space. Presence in absence means living in the present moment and loving it all: the pain, the loss, the sadness, yes, but also the joy, the laughter, the fun. It’s about integration, and most of the time, the presence no longer pursues me; it’s simply part of me now, along with the bright parts.

The Equinox is the most balanced day of the year, the time when there is as exactly as much darkness as there is light. Learning to balance is the whole human game, but it commands additional importance in these strange days. I wrote about this topic a year ago, and it’s interesting to reflect on how much has changed, yet stayed the same. We’re still living in a collective liminal space, returning to many of the things we used to do, but differently; echoes of the way things were. There is a different American administration, but we’re still living in a fear- and shame-soaked world, the trauma we’ve experienced together compounding with our individual suffering to create a climate of desperation and distrust, all while larger forces stoke polarities, strike up the band, and herd us back toward production.

The pandemic is the presence of absence writ global, causing us to see each other not as people, but as vectors for disease. Our collective fear of death, amplified by cultural and societal forces, blinds us to the nuance of living in community. But what if we could learn to integrate death as part of life, shadow as inherent contrast? Would it change our perspective? Nature is not binary, and neither are we. Plants use dying cells to regenerate themselves; gardens flourish by feeding up on the nutrients of the previous season’s decaying yield. Ecosystems thrive on diversity, seasonality, and symbiosis, the delicate ballet of give and take.

Faced with impossible decisions, we so readily turn upon each other, because it’s easier than facing our own internal darkness, or than acknowledging the light that might flicker within those with whom we don’t agree. On this Equinox, can we be present in the absence of all we have collectively lost—and as the seasons shift toward darkness, choose the light?