There are some absences that arrive quietly.
No announcement.
No explanation.
Just a Sunday that feels slightly wrong.
Then another.
And another.
At first you assume something ordinary has happened.
Life is busy.
People get delayed.
Phones die.
But slowly the silence begins to take on a shape.
A chair that remains empty long enough begins to feel like a question.
I keep the light on, just in case.
Where did you go?
Not in the dramatic sense.
Not the kind of disappearance that fills headlines.
Just the strange disappearance that happens when someone who used to show up…
doesn’t.
The old writers had a word for this.
Lament.
Not quite grief.
Not quite prayer.
Just speaking the confusion out loud.
Why?
Where are you?
Will things ever return?
She used to appear on Sundays.
Creative Sundays.
The strange ritual of making things out of nothing.
Stories.
Ideas.
Fragments of imaginary worlds.
Sanera and Jarden waiting patiently inside an almost completed novel.
Some stories require two voices.
One person holds the thread while the other pulls it through.
And when the second voice disappears…
The story pauses.
Lament is not anger.
Not really.
It is the moment when you sit in the quiet room and realize:
Something meaningful was happening here.
And now the room is quieter than it used to be.
The ancient writers understood this feeling.
In the middle of their sorrow they wrote something strange:
“Because of God’s love we are not consumed.
His mercies are new every morning.”
It is a strange sentence to write in the middle of disaster.
But maybe that is what hope actually looks like.
Not certainty.
Just the possibility that tomorrow might bring a voice back through the door.
So the room waits.
The story waits.
And somewhere inside the quiet there is still a small belief that morning might arrive again with an answer.
So if you are still out there somewhere,
I hope the night is gentle with you.
And if the road ever circles back this way…
The door may be small.
But the light will still be on.