heart, grow fonder

absent minded.
absentee ballots.
conspicuously absent.

I awoke today thinking about absence: that which is not present. Missing.  But, absence also implies that whatever or whomever is elsewhere should be here.

Here = where you are.

Absence, I propose, is something we create out of a sense of loss. It's emotional peekaboo. We open ourselves to an expected presence and are disappointed. We notice absence for its vacuum. It is the recognition of that which is not here.

So what happens when that which is not here asserts a presence? Maybe it's not a substantial presence, maybe it's passive, but when everyone in the room feels the same absence, does it become a spectre of sorts? And is there anything there?

Ghosts.
Dark Matter.
The past.

There are a great many things that we define by their conspicuous absence. Like my readers, for instance. Something that I believe these things have in common is the quality of an imagined presence, which possesses its own set of rules for existence. There are some permanently absent things, and things whose absences end, but I think that absence is totally dependent on the time in which it is perceived. In a linear model, a thing which is absent will always be absent from that given moment, even if it becomes present at a later time. I'm not sure how this would work in a non-linear temporal model, but it would probably be needlessly confusing with things being both present and absent at the same time.

I think also that presence is more complex than we know in our daily lives. How present are you when you eat breakfast? How present are you when you travel to work or school? How present are you when you have a conversation with someone you see nearly every day? How present are you when you stare off into space? What does it mean to be present in your own life?

Are you present, or are you your own ghost, merely haunting the place where you're supposed to be?