An Architecture of Absence

Were I to label the tribute I made for you, I wouldn't name it a cottage, or a sanctuary, or even a sepulchre. It would have one name: a temple. But it has no stones of a temple. It comes up from silence, about echoes, about the inhalation of fragments of what never swam in your ear. It has no foundations but longing, no ceiling but distance, no walls but fatigue from what never occurred. And it exists. And I return.

I do not dwell in this temple like a person seeking to be saved. I dwell in it like a person obligated to uphold ruins that were never erected. My feet stand on floors that do not exist; my hands brush against columns fabricated from air. And still, my heart will proclaim: This is sacred. But what is a temple other than the hubris of revering absence? The true paradox of devotion is: presence is mortal; absence endures.

Presence turns into habit, into the weary weight of the everyday. But absence—absence sharpens. Absence splits the heart into finer tools for feeling. It will not be recalled. It will not be confined. It grows fangs, it grows roots, it grows wings. So my temple thrives not on what fullness I was given; it thrives on the drought of what did not satiate. 

Tell me, is love not fiercest while lightless by lack of flesh to soften it? In the lack of a body to combust it? Unreturned, it burns purer. Ungraspable, it chews in blazes. It is a fire that shall not consume but shall burn clean; the lying shade of wood will be scoured until only essence remains. And perhaps that is why, at this moment, my temple stands while all other homes fell: because it is built not on what not, but on what was not. 

Do you see then the strange alchemy? Your absence becomes the builder. Every column raised to your silence. Every vaulted arch crowned towards a sky that never replies. Every chamber empties, yet is full of a homily of everything I couldn't say. Even your dismissal is a kind of liturgy; even your distance carves hymns into these walls.

Here, in this temple, I can perceive alcoves that still project your shadow lingering—hesitating, almost as if you might turn toward me. But you never do. I can see halls you should have laughed down, only dust to silt in sunshine's rays of light. I tend these rooms as if there might be a day I would be waiting for you—to greet. Though the truth is, I know you will not come. What kind of faith is that, but the faith of tedium that waits on that which does not come?

And so, I wander here, asking questions no priest could answer:
— Is love any more real, in not being realized? Because it cannot spoil into flesh? 
— Does absence keep what being would destroy? 
— Is longing the most honest worship because it asks only for my endurance?

If silence is not emptiness, but a compilation of those things which cannot be spoken, then this temple is full of endless preaching. The unsent letters. The unuttered confessions. The untaken touches. Each of these is a testimony frozen in the air, vibrating from now into forever. Do you see? Absence is not nothing—it is a powerful amplifier that amplifies all the things I swallowed, all the things I kept.

And memory supplies this shrine with relics. They aren't gold-plated relics, but cheap snippets of the past: the untended barest brush of your fingertips, your eyes that used to slide past and cut, ignored, the smile that stopped the sky and that quickly closed the door once again. These are my relics. I kneel before them, not as an act of worship, but in deep mourning. For what can we say is grief, but another form of reverence?

But then I ask, when I die, each one of these temples dies or crumbles with me; and what will remain? Or, could we all of us, each of us, be carrying an invisible temple of absence - framed to the memory of what we cannot keep, or advertently acknowledges the absence of what could not be kept, or, simply, mourning not what was loved, but what could never be lived or voiced? Perhaps everything we perceive as being is nothing more than an ever-expanding line of temples, forward in time, all of them echoing songs that never ceased of anticipation or songs of non-existence.

Some days, I hate this architecture. I curse its vaults, which echo only solitude, and I strike the walls and ask why love should visit me only as a ghost. But other days I find in its quietude a strange and terrible mercy. What is untainted, if not absence? What is eternal, if not what has never been tempted, never been tasted, and never come undone? Maybe the true beloved is not the beloved we cradle, but the beloved we cannot grab, because the act of failing her mirrors her greatness.

If you ever wonder where I have gone, when my eyes concern distances you cannot reach, and my silences too heavy to carry—
Know that I have gone to my temple.

I am sweeping its invisible floors.
I am lighting candles as if at altars of dust.
I am whispering the liturgy of things that were never alive.
I am asking the questions never answered by god.
And mostly—I am worshipping you.
Not in the way you were, nor the way you are, but as absence itself.
Since absence is the last god.
Absence is the architect of every prayer.
Absence is the only temple never to fall.

Ever yours,
A Worshipper of Absence
- Cartographer of What Was Not