---
name: absence
slug: absence
type: experiential-state
status: deprecated
version: 0.0.0
released: "unknown"
maintainer: "no one. that is the point."
dependencies:
  - presence
  - memory
  - time
  - the-specific-weight-of-a-sunday-afternoon
license: Unlicense (cannot be revoked once installed)
tags:
  - loss
  - grief
  - negative-space
  - load-bearing-nothing
  - do-not-touch
---

absence

What it actually is

The shape that something leaves when it stops being there. Not nothing. The opposite of nothing. A precise, load-bearing hole.

How it works

Absence does not arrive. It is revealed. You reach for the thing, the person, the version of yourself that used to live in this room, and your hand closes on air that is the exact temperature and texture of what is gone.

It runs on memory as fuel. Memory is the bug, not the feature. Without it, absence would be a clean zero. With it, absence is a subtraction problem that keeps producing the wrong answer.

The mechanism is simple and unforgivable:

Something exists.
It stops.
The space it occupied does not close.
You keep trying to fill it with inferior substitutes: nostalgia, routine, other people who are not the right people.
The space remains the original size. Catalogued. Indexed. Searchable at 3am.

Configuration

trigger_sensitivity: maximum
suppression_attempts_supported: yes
suppression_success_rate: 0.00
activation_delay: variable
  # may fire immediately or wait until a random Tuesday
  # may be triggered by: a song, a smell, someone else's laugh, nothing at all
runtime: indefinite
graceful_shutdown: not implemented

Known bugs

This is the main event. Read carefully.

The size problem. Absence scales to match what was lost. Small losses leave small holes. Large losses leave holes that are, structurally speaking, bigger than the person who has to carry them. No patch exists. This is not a bug that will be fixed in a later release.
The dormancy trap. Absence can go quiet for months, even years. You will mistake this for resolution. You will be wrong. It is simply waiting for a sensory trigger with your exact specifications. It has time and you do not.
Presence contamination. Every presence is now haunted. When someone stays, you are already computing what it will feel like when they leave. Absence has colonized the future. This is called anticipatory grief and it is not hypothetical.
The inheritance bug. Absence is transmissible. The hole in you can grow a matching hole in someone else. This is documented but not well understood.
Cannot be uninstalled. Not cleanly. Workarounds exist: meaning-making, ritual, keeping busy until the lights go out. None of them free the memory. They just move it to a directory you check less often.
The comparison exploit. Users frequently attempt to minimize their instance by comparing it to larger instances. This does not reduce the load. It adds shame to the stack.

Error codes

Code	Message	Resolution
`ABN_001`	`presence not found`	none
`ABN_002`	`memory integrity too high`	irreversible
`ABN_003`	`substitution failed`	expected
`ABN_404`	`what you are looking for no longer exists at this path`	you already knew

Deprecation notice

Absence was never supposed to be the primary process. It was designed as a side effect of love, which itself was experimental and shipped without adequate documentation.

The maintainer has not responded to issues.

The maintainer is, in some sense, also an instance of this package.