Fade into thin air,β¨
Shadows hiding your presence,β¨
Release me from you.
The room learned to hold its breath when he was there.
Not because he was loudβhe was notβbut because everything bent slightly around his presence.
Chairs remembered his weight.
Corners kept his outline.
Even after he left, the air behaved as if it were still accommodating him.
She noticed it first in the evenings.
How the light refused to settle.
How shadows lingered where no object stood.
As if the day itself had been trained to make space.
He had not done anything dramatic.
That was the trouble. No storming exits.
No slammed doors. Just a slow occupation of the unseen.
A way of being felt without being fully present. A way of staying without staying.
She tried to explain it once and gave up.
There are no good words for absence that still watches you.
Time passed. Not in a healing montage wayβmore like dust accumulating on a shelf you keep meaning to wipe.
One day, she realised she was arranging her thoughts as if he might overhear them.
Editing herself for an audience that no longer existed.
That was the moment she understood the haiku.
Fading is not disappearance. It is subtraction.
Shadows do not hide you from the lightβthey tell you where the light is blocked.
So she did something very small and very brave.
She stopped checking the corners.
Stopped listening for the echo.
She let the light fall where it wanted, even when it felt unfamiliar, even when it exposed the emptiness too clearly.
The shadows thinned.
Not all at once. They never do.
But they lost their authority.
One morning, the room exhaled.
And somewhere between the door and the window, the space where he used to be forgot how to hold his shape.
That was the release.
