The Architecture of Absence

The body remembers in ways that fracture. It holds the weight of a Sunday afternoon, where the light fractures against the kitchen tiles, where the air is too thick with the unsaid. There is no violence quite like omission, no silence sharper than the kind that coils behind familiar eyes. I have become an architect of my own disappearance, folding myself into the quiet. It began young. I learnt to starve the space I occupied, to thin myself until I was nearly invisible.

Time, cruel companion, thickens the obscurity. It wraps itself around my ankles, pulls me backwards, never forwards. I have grown in reverse, it seems. With every year, I feel less like a daughter, less like a child, more like the echo of something never quite made whole. If I reach back far enough, I can almost see her: the girl I was supposed to be, before the scaffolding collapsed. Before I became the detritus that family cannot bear to sift through.

There are mirrors in this house, cracked from the strain of holding my reflection. I see myself distorted in their shards, multiple versions of me bleeding into each other, none of them enough. Family, a word sharp enough to cut. They say blood is thicker, but blood coagulates when left unattended. I’ve felt it thicken, felt it clot between us. No longer flowing, no longer life, just the residue of obligation.

I trace the lineage of women who spoke of drowning. Virginia, who filled her pockets with stones, walking into the river as though it were an embrace. Sylvia, gasping for air beneath the bell jar, suffocating in the space between the world and herself. Anne, swallowing the ocean, each wave a hymn. Their words seep into me. Their endings mark the margins of my thoughts. They remind me that sometimes the void calls louder than any voice could.

But I am not them. I am the survivor of my own undoing, the one left behind to pick through the ruins of expectation. My family built me on shaky foundations. I was meant to be the right shape, the right sound, the right daughter. But I came out sideways. Always a little too sharp at the edges, always slipping out of the role written for me.

They see the outline, they love the outline, but they have never loved the flesh beneath it. I sit at the table, speak when spoken to, smile in the pauses. The girl they see is a ghost I wear for their comfort. Underneath, I am raw. I am screaming. But they do not hear it, or they choose not to.

I have sought other homes, pieced together families from fragments. Lovers, friends, the ones who see me in the half-light and do not turn away. They hold the soft parts, the jagged ones too, without asking me to soften. But the body does not forget. Blood does not forget. The absence of love carves deeper than the presence of it ever could.

I refuse explanation. The women before me never apologised for their wounds. They displayed them, let them bleed across the page. I do the same. I write my way into being because no one has ever spoken me whole. I am fragments, stitched together in sentences. I am a story I must tell myself again and again to believe I exist.

Obscurity shields me. If I remain blurred, they cannot define me. If I am formless, I cannot be fixed in place. But obscurity is a lonely room. It echoes with the hollow sound of my own breath. I crave the risk of visibility, the ache of being seen. Yet every time I step into the light, I feel the burn of their gaze, the weight of their disappointment.

I think of the women who held razors to their wrists, pens to paper, who chose oblivion over obedience. I do not blame them. The body can only carry so much grief before it begs to be let go. I carry their words like amulets, reminders that there is strength in survival, even when it looks like surrender.

My family does not know the weight I bear. They see the smile, the nod, the agreeable silence. They do not see the way I fall apart when the door closes. The way I gather myself up, piece by piece, only to unravel again. It is an endless task, mending the seams they tear open without realising.

There are days I want to scream, to shatter the glass that separates us, to force them to see the blood beneath the surface. But I know they will only look away. They prefer the outline, they cannot love what they do not understand.

And so I remain in the in-between, the space where obscurity and time pull at me. I feel myself thinning, dissolving into the void they made in me. But even voids have edges. Even emptiness can hold shape. In the absence, I find the call to create. To move. To resist.

The women who wrote their own endings did not have the luxury of movement. They were caged by expectation, by the walls that closed in tighter with every breath. I have inherited their defiance. I do not walk into the river, I do not turn on the gas. I write. I move. I breathe.

I build new altars. I gather the broken pieces of family, forge them into something else. A chosen kinship, a fragile mosaic of acceptance. It is not enough to erase the ache, but it is enough to keep going. Enough to remind me that I am more than the absence they made of me.

When the dust settles, I am a mess. I think of them: Virginia, Sylvia, Anne, adrift. They did not leave quietly. Their exits were declarations, as much art as anguish. I gather their echoes, their sentences unfinished but resonant, and hold them like flares in the dark.

They remind me that survival is not always gentle. That some bodies, some souls, burn too brightly to be held by the smallness of expectation. I am not their ending. I am the continuation, the flicker that persists. They wrote themselves out of the cages; I write myself through them. When I am undone, I am still writing. When I am erased, I rewrite. I am the wreckage of survival, the evidence of a life lived between margins. 

I am the afterword they never got to pen.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

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