This is Poem 3 of a poetry collection. The final count will be between eighteen and twenty-two poems, depending on which ones earn their place by the end. Each poem will be accompanied, two days after it drops, by the drafts that preceded it.
The absence of a person, even when things are otherwise all right, makes the world stop making sense in the same way. A landscape that behaves correctly but feels wrong. The subway runs on time, the emails keep arriving, the calendar fills itself with obligations, and yet something essential has slipped out of alignment. This is not a catastrophe. It is also not nothing. The world can continue without collapsing and still be profoundly altered.
The body registers this before the mind can name it; a kind of frequency loss. The other person gave shape to the ambient noise, and their absence reveals how much of your orientation depended on that shared signal. You operate at a different resolution, and everything feels slightly too large or too quiet to fit the way it did before.
This state is the interval between one calibration and the next, and the discipline is in staying functional while the recalibration happens. You do not force the frequency back or pretend the loss of it is insignificant; you continue anyway, with the full knowledge that the system is already finding its way back to coherence.
The poem below lives in that interval. In 16 Million Minus 1, I explored how a single absence can distort the scale of everything around it. In It’s Not a Big Deal (Or Is It?), I traced how the body registers what the mind tries to minimize. This poem extends that logic into a more intimate register: a world that continues to operate but has lost its calibration, and a person who continues alongside it, waiting for the signal to return.
The Rain Is Just Rain
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