Devotions in the Glow: Learning to Live With Absence

There are days when the past feels like an altar I can’t escape. I find myself standing before it, drawn in by something I can’t name, as if I’m worshipping at the feet of something long lost. The glow of the past is a flickering neon light, always there, never steady, casting shadows where the real truth might lie. I kneel before it in my mind, lighting candles for ghosts who never really existed in the first place, but who haunt me just the same.

There’s a quiet desperation in this devotion, a need to grasp hold of something that isn’t there. It’s the kind of longing that folds into paper cranes, delicate and fragile, sent off into the wind as though they could somehow find their way back to something I can hold onto. We all know the feeling, the irrational hope that time can somehow run backward, that the things we’ve lost can be found again if we just wish hard enough.

I trace the shape of absence, trying to memorize it, as if learning its contours will help me understand the space it occupies in my life. I watch the condensation on a car window, and in that foggy world, I can see you. But as soon as I try to focus, it slips away, like all the things that have slipped through my fingers, like all the people who have faded into the background of my story.

Absence becomes its own kind of presence when you’ve lived with it long enough. You begin to hear the faint whispers of it in the most ordinary places, like the crackling static of a TV that’s not tuned in, or the slow stretch of honey dissolving into tea. These moments are not magic, but they feel like it because they offer a brief reprieve, a moment when the world softens just enough to make you believe again, if only for a second.

But there’s nothing left to believe in, not really. There’s no magic in absence, just the echo of something that once was. The ghosts I chase, the names I whisper, they don’t return. They never will. And yet, I keep searching. I keep telling myself that absence, in its quiet way, is a presence. Maybe because it’s all I have left. A silent devotion, a prayer without words.

This is the quiet work of grief, learning how to live with what is no longer here, learning how to let go without ever really letting go. It’s about finding meaning in the absence, seeing it not as something that takes, but as something that leaves a space for something new to grow. Because even though I can’t call you back, I’m still here, and I’m still listening.

In this glow of devotion, I remind myself that the past doesn’t disappear just because we move on from it. It stays, flickering in the corners, a chapel that refuses to be silenced. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe some things are meant to stay, not to haunt us, but to teach us how to keep moving, how to keep loving in the quiet spaces we’re left with.