There is a difference between absence and loss. When we lose something, the lack of it creates grief, a sadness for the thing or the person that once was there. It is a taking away. We feel the gap, the hole cut into our existence. Sadness and longing take the place of the thing lost. But absence is different. With absence there is no grief, just a neutral space and where there is space there is potential.
Loss, losing, loose, lost, all these words imply the going away, the letting go, the undoing. You, the person left behind, remain. And the remaining signals grief. We experience loss when someone dies, when we are rejected, when we are left behind. The ship has sailed, and we are not on it. The precious cargo has drifted away leaving a gap where it once was. We desperately want to will it back to us, to wrap our arms around it, and draw it close again, curling our body around it’s significance.
But absence is a space unfilled, a potential not yet potentiated. Absence is a room to be filled with laughter and music, an idea to be imagined, a structure to be crafted, a garden not yet bloomed. Absence is joy. Absence is hope, belief, and possibility. Absence is the space to imagine and build the impossible because it is not yet created. Once an idea becomes a reality the space is filled. Absence is that moment, heavy and energized with possibility, the second before the impossible becomes possible and loses all its potential by existing.
Absence can take the place of loss if the gap is filled, not with longing, trying to re-engage the known, but instead the gap is filled with hope for the unknowable and the unknown.