The Shape of Absence
What happens when someone touches your skin, but never reaches you.
They didn't flinch.
They just moved on.
Like nothing had landed at all.
But I'd said something that cost me.
Quietly. Carefully. The kind of truth I rehearse five times in my head—not because I doubt it, but because I've learnt that authenticity, when unedited, often comes at a price.
It was a work call. Just updates. Targets. Numbers.
Until I mentioned I'm Autistic. Not for sympathy. Just context. A way of explaining that I might pause longer, speak more precisely, respond more to tone than to words. That my presence doesn't always look like theirs.
They nodded. Smiled—the polite kind, a quick blink of accept-and-move-on.
Then they moved on.
And I was still there—but the conversation wasn't.
I'd offered something. It didn't get rejected. It got... nothing. Not discomfort. Not engagement. Not even hesitation.
Just the sound of the next bullet point.
Afterwards, I didn't cry. I didn't panic. I just slumped in my office chair, shoulders curved inward, hands limp on the desk. Because I didn't know how else to stay present when my being there hadn't registered at all.
Other people filter. I absorb. And when nothing comes back, it doesn't sting. It dissolves. Like a mist left in someone else's breath.
This wasn't the first time I'd vanished while still in the room. Just the most recent in a pattern I couldn't seem to break—whether in professional spaces or personal ones.
What I craved wasn't grand. Wasn't extraordinary.
I didn't want romance. Or affection. Or to be chosen.
I just needed to feel like I hadn't evaporated.
So I booked her.
I. Hope, Curated and Costly
Marina. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Dress size 8. Russian. Mid-to-late twenties.
The profile was standard—a few sentences about beauty, discretion, attentiveness. A clean white backdrop. Tasteful lingerie. The soft promise of time well spent.
But it was one line, buried deep in a client review, that caught me.
"She makes you feel like she's actually there."
Not warm. Not playful. Not unforgettable.
There.
I read it three times. Then again. Just to make sure I hadn't imagined it.
Presence—actual, resonant, human presence—is rarer than beauty. Rarer than touch. It's the one thing I can't buy outright. The one thing I'm not sure I've ever been given without condition.
And after the work call... after retreating so deeply into myself that the meeting continued as if I'd never spoken at all... I didn't want to be adored.
I just wanted to be registered.
II. A Room Pre-Written
Marina opened the door with the kind of smile that lands perfectly, but leaves nothing behind. Symmetrical. Short. Delivered more than given.
"Come in," she said. Her accent softened the edges.
The flat was modern. Cream tones. Beige throw. Diffused amber light that cast no shadows. Every object softly placed—as if the room had been arranged not for comfort, but for plausible intimacy.
She offered water. A gesture. I declined. She nodded.
I watched her adjust the duvet. Then smooth a nonexistent crease. Then adjust it again.
Not anxious. Not performative. Just... rehearsed.
Like a host arranging flowers while guests are already seated—going through motions that should have happened before the moment began.
The room held everything except the one thing I'd come for, the weight of silence settling between us.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Neutral. Not slouched. Not leaning in. Just... in position. Space made, in case presence wanted to enter it.
She didn't move toward me.
III. Touch Without Landing
That silence had weight. Her hands did not.
They were light. Trained. Moving across my skin with the kind of calm that's meant to relax you.
But there was no weight. No substance behind the gesture.
Just contact. Then movement.
Her palm rested against my chest—a pause. But it didn't feel like a moment shared. It felt like she was checking for warmth. Not offering it.
I reached up. Gently. Fingertips against her cheek.
Smooth. Cool. No scent.
She didn't pull away. She didn't respond.
She simply... allowed it.
Like a mannequin tolerating touch for display.
That stillness—it didn't feel like rejection.
It felt like absence.
Absence with structure. The shape of a person with nothing inside it for me to meet.
Rejection at least acknowledges your existence. This was something else entirely—a complete unregistering of my presence.
My inner world doesn't just register touch—it hungers for the resonance behind it. The intention. Without that, contact becomes just another form of distance.
For someone like me, who feels everything at a higher volume, that absence wasn't just disappointing.
It was disorienting.
My fingertips still warm from contact. My being registering nothing in return.
IV. Small Questions, Large Silence
I needed something. Anything. A flicker of response.
"What kind of oil do you like using?"
She turned to the table. Glanced at the bottle. Then back to me.
"Oil?" she said. "Any."
That was it.
A word. Then a pause. Not long enough to be considered. Not short enough to be rude.
And then nothing.
The silence didn't grow. It just... stood there.
Not holding space. Not asking for more. Just... waiting.
I felt the urge to apologise for asking. For speaking.
In that moment, her neutrality didn't just fail to land as care.
It landed as erasure.
My words had touched the air between us and dissolved completely, leaving no trace of ever having existed. Just like me in that work meeting. Just like me in so many rooms before.
A familiar voice surfaced in my mind, the one that always tries to rationalise away the ache:
She's just doing her job. Don't make this into something it isn't.
But for someone whose sensory world processes each gesture, each absence with physical intensity—it confirms a suspicion carried since childhood: that perhaps I move through the world as a ghost already.
Visible only when I perform the right script with the right inflection at the right moment.
I became nothing but a ripple that left no trace.
V. The Memory That Slipped In
Traces. That's what memories are.
At some point—I don't know when—one surfaced.
Not loud. Not cinematic.
Just a flicker of sand beneath small fingers.
I was five. Maybe six. A girl beside me. We were crouched near the edge of a playground, pressing shapes into the sand with our hands.
I remember the weight of her palm in mine. And—without thinking—I'd lifted it, and kissed her knuckles.
There was no fear. No agenda. No effort.
Just the quiet instinct of I see you.
And in this room—this staged, scented, careful room—that memory felt cruel.
The contrast between then and now opening something in my chest that felt like hunger. Like thirst. Like some primal need older than desire itself.
I realised what I'd come here searching for wasn't touch.
It was that.
The simplicity of being real to someone.
The playground sand between my fingers had felt more substantial than this entire room, this entire exchange. We seek in adulthood what once came to us naturally—before we learnt to doubt our own existence.
That seeking led me to words. To quiet voices who understood this particular kind of loneliness.
In the stillness of that room, I found myself thinking of Levinas. His belief that we only truly exist when someone witnesses our presence. When a face meets a face without looking away.
I didn't understand it then, reading his words years ago.
But I did in this room, where presence's absence felt like a small death.
And so I write these experiences down.
Not to understand them better,
but to recognise others who might feel the same quiet erasure.
To say: you're not the only ghost in the room.
These thoughts dissolved as Marina's voice pulled me back to the present moment.
VI. Departure by Reset
"Time's almost up."
She said it gently.
Not rushed. Not mechanical.
But something in me tightened anyway. A small knot forming around my heart, like a hand closing around nothing.
I nodded. Sat up.
She wiped her hands. Smoothed the sheet. Folded the towel.
Each motion erased the trace of where I'd been—like a hotel maid restoring the illusion of untouched space.
She offered tissues. A small smile. "Take care."
I dressed slowly. Focused on each step.
Socks. Trousers. Belt.
I wasn't humiliated. Or hurt. Or even disappointed.
Just... faded.
Like I'd entered the room heavy, and left with nothing tethered to me.
No moment shared. No warmth exchanged.
Just absence. Repeated.
My body moving through motions while my mind searched for an anchor that wasn't there.
I left feeling emptied, carrying something that ached without injury.
VII. The Ache That Doesn't Cut
Some wounds leave marks.
This didn't.
There was no sharpness. No cruelty. No story.
Marina hadn't flinched. She hadn't recoiled. She hadn't laughed.
She'd simply never been there at all.
I wasn't unseen. I was unregistered.
And for someone like me—who doesn't just feel moments, but absorbs them—that's not nothing.
That's a kind of vanishing.
The hollow feeling like the space after an exhale, when the lungs are empty but the next breath hasn't yet begun.
The room had touched my skin, but not my depths. She'd held my chest, but not my presence.
Nothing landed. So nothing held.
And I walked out the door not in pain—but in something quieter. Stranger. A weightless absence, like the moment after music stops, when your body still feels the echo but your ears meet only silence.
At first, I thought it was disappointment. Later, I realised it was erasure.
VIII. The Ending That Faded Before It Formed
There are moments that change you.
There are moments that break you.
And then—there are moments like this.
That leave nothing behind.
No edge to press against. No shape to remember.
Just the dull, quiet ache of unconfirmed existence.
She wasn't cold.
She just wasn't there.
I walked several streets before I could feel the pavement beneath my feet again. Before the world's edges sharpened back into focus.
My hands in my pockets. My breath visible in the cold air—at least that had substance, could be seen.
I didn't cry.
I didn't rage.
I just continued.
Not because something in me had healed. But because erasure teaches you its own kind of resilience.
To exist without witnesses.
To matter without confirmation.
I wasn't rejected. I was unregistered. And somehow, that's the deeper wound.
When my wife and partner of 33 years died, I was 61 and desperate to reinvent myself, to reconnect, but to whom, with what? A not particularly wise friend said something important. "You need the touch of a woman." I could never risk visiting a sex worker, the idea terrified me. But I knew of a well- regarded therapeutic masseuse. Even her touch frightened me, exposed me. But, yes, I found her touch curative and, in a way, better than loving. I was released back into the land of the living.
It's a really unnervingly beautiful piece. I felt my heart clenched the whole time reading because this distance and lack of connection -- this absence -- is so palpable in this piece and it really gets under your skin. Perhaps it's the choice of words that makes it relatable, or maybe the honestly of how you write about it... but it feels like a pang in the heart.
I'm just seeing this image of two objects within each other's gravitational force, rotating in constant motion, but there is not even a wind touching them, nothing connected... they just somehow move in methodical, predictable fashion to each other, but without true contact or relation.