Echoes of Absence
He could still feel the emptiness when someone he loved was gone — an aching sensation, as if part of him had been carved out and left behind in the shadows of their absence. It was a feeling that haunted him, coming in waves, sometimes gentle and nostalgic, at other times crashing down with the force of a tide he could not resist. There were moments when the longing bordered on madness, as if his mind were trying to tether itself to something distant and unreachable. He had come to understand that this madness was not the irrationality it seemed to be; it was the raw human instinct to hold onto what mattered most.
As the time passed, he realized that missing someone was not just about the person themselves, but about the way they colored his world, the way they had shaped his very sense of being. In their absence, his mind would drift to memories of them — simple moments, shared smiles, fragments of conversations long past. Each recollection left him both comforted and desolate, as though the weight of remembering was both solace and sorrow. It wasn’t just the person he missed; it was the version of himself that existed in their presence, the part of him that felt whole when they were near.
He often thought about the science behind it. There were chemical processes, circuits in the brain responsible for attachment and reward, the release of oxytocin and dopamine that made human bonds so essential. But no scientific explanation could capture the true experience of missing someone. It was a sensation that seeped into the soul, far deeper than any neural pathway. Perhaps it was a fundamental flaw in the human design, he mused, that in the face of absence, we should feel incomplete.
Yet, it was not only longing that dominated his emotional landscape. Jealousy, too, lurked in the shadows, gnawing at the edges of his thoughts. It was an emotion he loathed — primal, irrational, and often unbidden. Jealousy made him feel small, as if his worth depended on the affection, attention, or admiration others received. It was humiliating, he thought, to be so consumed by the fear of losing something or someone, to see another’s happiness as a threat to his own.
Over time, he came to recognize jealousy for what it truly was : a reflection of his own insecurities, his doubts about his own value. He understood now that jealousy was not about others; it was about himself. It was the fear that he was not enough, that what he had — who he was — would never be sufficient. He had read philosophers who spoke of jealousy as a form of self-doubt, a desperate clinging to illusions of control and possession. He knew that, deep down, jealousy was rooted in the fear of loss — loss of love, of belonging, of one’s place in the world.
Jealousy, like longing, was a mirror, showing him the places where his heart was fragile. He had learned to face it with a sort of resigned humility, knowing that to feel jealous was to admit that he was vulnerable. And yet, he also realized that vulnerability was not a weakness, but a sign of his capacity to care, to love, to invest himself in the world around him.
In these moments of tumultuous emotion — whether it was the aching longing for someone or the gnawing burn of jealousy — he often sought refuge in silence. Silence, for him, had become both a sanctuary and a revelation. It was in silence that he found the space to breathe, to reflect, to make sense of the storm within. He had once thought of silence as an absence, but now he understood it as presence — an active stillness that allowed him to listen, not only to the world but to his own heart.
He had read somewhere that silence activated the brain’s default mode network, the area responsible for introspection. In silence, the mind could rest and wander, exploring the caverns of thought and emotion without distraction. He had felt this himself — the clarity that came after moments of quiet contemplation, the peace that settled in the wake of stillness. Silence, he realized, was not a void but a space in which to grow.
Philosophers had long spoken of the power of silence — Heidegger, for one, had written about the importance of stillness in coming to terms with existence. For him, silence was a confrontation with being, a moment when one could finally let go of the noise and the pretense and face the essence of life. He found solace in this idea. Silence, for him, became a way to reconcile the contradictions of longing and jealousy. In silence, he could feel the depth of his emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
In the stillness, he would reflect on the alchemy of these emotions — how longing, jealousy, and silence were not separate forces but intertwined threads in the fabric of his life. Longing, he had learned, taught him about love, about the capacity for connection that stretched beyond physical presence. It revealed to him the vulnerability of being human, the ache of attachment. Jealousy, though painful, forced him to confront his insecurities, to question what he truly valued and why. And silence — it was in silence that he found the space to understand, to heal, to let go.
Looking back, he saw these emotions as part of the same journey — a journey not toward resolution but toward acceptance. To miss someone madly, to feel jealous of another’s joy, to sit in silence with the weight of these feelings — these were the experiences that shaped him, that brought him closer to understanding the fullness of his own humanity. He could not outrun them, nor would he want to. They were reminders of his capacity to feel deeply, to live fully, to be present in the world.
And so, he embraced the paradox of human emotion. He learned to love the questions, as Rilke had suggested — to live them rather than seek easy answers. In the longing, in the jealousy, in the silence, he found himself. He found the echoes of his own existence, reverberating through time, through absence and presence, through the noise and the quiet.
In those echoes, he realized that the answers he had been seeking were not found in the resolution of his emotions, but in their unfolding. And in that unfolding, he discovered that life, in all its complexity, was not meant to be solved—but to be felt.
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Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.