The Geometry of Missing You

I used to think distance was something honest
a number between two places,
a train timetable,
the blue line of a motorway folded inside a glove compartment.

Then you left and the kitchen stayed exactly where it was.

The cup with the small crack was still beside the sink.
A coat I never liked hung behind the door for weeks
because moving it felt too deliberate.

Nothing had changed enough to explain your absence.
That was the strange part.

Morning continued arriving.
The neighbour dragged his chair across the floor.
Someone laughed in the street at two a.m.
The radiator made that sound
it had always made just before becoming warm.

And still, somehow,
the rooms had grown larger.

I began measuring things without meaning to:

the empty half of the bed,
the seconds before answering I’m fine,
the distance from my hand
to the telephone
when I knew I shouldn’t call.

There should be a unit for that.

Not kilometres.
Not hours.

Something smaller
and much more cruel.

The space between
remembering someone’s voice
and realising
you can no longer remember
exactly how they said your name.

I think that is when I understood:

missing you was never about
how far away you were.

It was discovering
that a person can leave
and still occupy
an impossible amount of room.