Negative Space – I

You arrived quietly —

like a chair

set into a room

I had mistaken for complete.

We did not name it.

We allowed it

the dignity of remaining

unclaimed —

music arresting

at the same wound,

light inclining

towards the same surfaces,

an instinct for beauty

neither of us

interrogated.

Somewhere, without sanction,

you entered

the architecture of my days.

Neither a lover.

Nor a mere friend.

Something more exacting —

my necessary proportion.

The unseen axis

on which

everything steadied.

And now you are leaving.

I record it

as if language

might diminish its finality.

And now you are leaving —

taking nothing

that admits of evidence.

Only absence —

lucid, irreproachable.

I had presumed

there would be time

to unfasten you

from the weave of things.

Instead, you depart

like breath

withdrawn from glass —

instant, indivisible.

And now you are leaving.

The world misaligns —

music attenuates,

light misplaces itself,

walls retain

an excess of echo.

You were never surplus.

You were calibration.

The line

that rendered coherence possible.

And now you are leaving.

What remains

is not vacancy

but distortion —

a canvas

bereft of vanishing point,

a sentence

stripped of its governing verb.

I move through the day

slightly deranged from centre.

But nothing fractures.

And that is the cruelty.

Only a thread withdrawn

with such deliberation

the fabric

maintains its pretence.

And I am left

with nothing tangible —

only your contour

impressed upon air.

And now you are leaving.

Negative Space – II

I had always known

you were provisional —

like winter light

resting briefly

along the edge of a table.

There was no promise.

We were disciplined

in our refusals.

And still

I installed you everywhere.

In music.

In colour.

In the quiet curation

of my days.

I carried your leaving

as one carries a fracture in glass,

latent,

revealed only

under certain light.

But not like this.

Not with such proximity —

like breath arrested

mid-utterance.

There should have been

a gentler interval,

time enough

to disassemble the habit of you.

Instead,

you are already

in recession

and I persist

in reaching

through small insubordinations:

a chair

left fractionally open,

a song

abandoned too soon,

a thought

still turning

towards you.

How does one instruct the body

to relinquish

what it was never

authorised to keep?

How does one reduce a presence

to something commensurate

with survival?

You are leaving

with insufficient duration

for grief to acquire form.

And so it arrives

unmediated,

inarticulate,

proximate to the bone.

I knew.

I knew.

And yet,

knowledge proved

structurally inadequate.

Negative Space III

Fault Lines I Knew by Heart

You are not the first

to inscribe absence into me.

Others preceded you —

some as rupture,

others as subtraction

so exact

it resembled design.

They spoke of forever

in the careless tense of certainty,

as though time were compliant.

Then receded

like a name lost mid-sentence,

the mouth still shaped

to contain it.

What remained

was never emptiness

but contour,

a hollow

retaining the memory

of its precise burden.

I learnt the sequence:

arrival, warmth, expansion

then the measured withdrawal.

So, I revised myself.

Narrowed the corridors.

Instructed the doors

in restraint.

And still,

those who held

the unguarded cartography of me

elected elsewhere.

Not betrayal,

something more austere:

departure

without explanation.

Thus abandonment

perfected itself into habit

the body anticipating loss,

relinquishing in advance.

Each leaving

arrives singular

its own incision,

refusing analogy,

refusing mercy.

Then you—

you entered

as if resistance were unnecessary,

as if my defences

were merely provisional.

And I,

against all prior evidence,

permitted it.

We inhabited borrowed time,

streets, sentences, silences,

and for a while

coherence seemed plausible.

But beneath it,

steady, incontrovertible,

the knowing.

I knew you would leave.

Not as fear.

As fact.

Still,

knowledge confers

no immunity.

And now

the departure commences.

Your presence attenuates

into memory,

your nearness recedes

into the past tense.

I feel the hollow

Reconstituting,

precise, practised,

prepared to accommodate

another absence.

Habit — yes.

Immunity — never.

This is the third architecture

I endure.

I do not learn.

And now —

you are leaving.