The Shape of an Absence تحریر

On days when I think of you, missing you feels like too small a phrase. It does not reach the depth of it. Missing suggests something neat, containable, almost ordinary. But what I feel is less tidy than that. It is a low ache moving through the day. It is grief without ceremony. It is love with nowhere to go.

What does grief look like when the person is still alive, but no longer around you? When they are somewhere under the same sky of the world, breathing, waking, eating, moving through their own hours, and yet absent from the shape of your days? It is a peculiar sorrow, because it has no finality, no grave, no proper ending. Only distance. Only interruption. Only the unfinished weight of what once moved so naturally between two people.

Somehow Chitral teaches me how to breathe through this. Or perhaps it only holds me while I try. The very construct of this place — its mountains, its waiting light, its long pauses, its winds that seem to know your name before you speak it — allows me to take things as they come. Not with acceptance exactly, but with a kind of mountain patience. Here, the heart learns to sit beside what it cannot solve.

Love is a strange thing. I am not sure I fully understand it. Perhaps I do not want to. Perhaps I prefer it like this: half-lit, unsaid, moving quietly beneath the surface of things. Something I do not have to explain in order to know it has changed me.

At times I embrace all aspects of this unsaid love — my home in Chitral, the hour as it arrives, the silence between one thought and the next. Perhaps it is the moment itself that I want to pause. The waiting of the in-between. That is what I want to catch before it disappears.

Like the raindrops I tasted with my lips when I was in Power, that small village in Yarkhun. Like the particular direction the wind moved across my hands in Gazzen, as if it had somewhere urgent and tender to go. Like the taste of rice in Mastuj, simple and fleeting, yet held in the mouth of memory long after the plate is gone.

These are not just memories. They are encounters. Different minds, different hearts, different ways of being touched by a place and by people whose names do not always need to be spoken. Not everything precious asks to be named. Some things live more truthfully in feeling.

What is a ritual, really? How do you make something last? What stays?

And yet the truth is that nothing stays. Everything finishes. There is always an ending waiting somewhere, even in the middle of what feels most alive. There is always an unfinished conversation. A door half-open. A sentence that does not know it has already become memory.

So I find myself wondering: how do I recreate touch? The nearness of a body. The intimacy of a shared platter placed between two people. The unspoken knowledge carried in small gestures. How does one return to something that lived most fully in its passing?

I realise now that this is where Chitral enters me most deeply. Through you, through absence, through all that cannot be held for long. Somehow this place keeps showing me corners of myself I had never reached before. It unpacks rooms within me that had remained shut for years. It lets in a certain light, and that light seems to know exactly why it has entered.

I guard it. I protect it. I place my hands around it as if warmth alone might persuade it to remain.

But when it decides to leave, I let it go.

Perhaps that, too, is love.