I. The Conversation That Never Was
“Absence is a form of presence.”
(Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet)
Warsaw, a brief return for a few days. A city of different light, a different pace, a different me. I run into him by chance — an old boyfriend from high school, the one who still had chestnut hair, hoodies too big for his frame, that shyness behind his eyelids. We meet at a crossing — an exchange of glances, then a smile of recognition and greeting. We pause, as if neither of us wants the moment to last any longer than necessary.
We talk about everything and nothing. About university, about cities that hosted us for a while, about work we don’t like but that pays the rent. About travel, about families, about the weather, always a little different here, always unpredictable. Not once do we mention what really matters — that past relationship, why we broke up, why we spent years without speaking, why each of us carries an unfinished story inside.
There’s something both painful and gentle in this meeting. Anne Carson wrote, “Absence is a form of presence.” I feel it acutely: every silence is a shadow of the conversation that never took place, of words that were never said, of a farewell that stretches over a lifetime. What remains unspoken hangs between us like a transparent curtain — it lingers in the air, untouchable, but also won’t let us truly part.
I leave this encounter with a sense of incompletion. In my mind I compose possible dialogues: “I’m sorry I never said everything back then,” “I didn’t know how to be present for you,” “Maybe if we’d been braver, everything would have been different.” But none of these sentences are ever spoken — not then, not now. Love that never closed remains in the body as a tremor, as an unresolved question, as an afterimage that doesn’t fade, even after years.
I wonder whether we have to explain everything in order to let go. Does closure require words, or is it more a matter of accepting that some things will never find an answer? Sometimes parting isn’t a choice, but an inability to be together, immaturity, fear, escape. Sometimes the most painful are the conversations that never took place.
What remains in the body is what cannot be named: a gesture missed in time, a word stuck in the throat, a glance that slipped away too soon. Unresolved matters are like scars — they hurt at first, then become invisible marks that remind you of themselves with each new love.
Do we need to explain everything to be able to leave?
Or perhaps the most honest thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to allow ourselves the conversations that never happened — and to learn to live with their absence as a new form of presence.
II. The Letter Never Sent
“What is a letter if not a conversation with absence?”
(Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
After that encounter, I try to write him a letter — not to send, just to set free the words that crowd my head. I write in the kitchen, late at night, with a lamp casting a yellow pool over the table. I pause after every sentence, revising, erasing, starting again. The letter grows, mutates, becomes a spiral of things unsaid: regret, apology, gratitude, all braided into one voice.
“I wanted to tell you that I remember everything — the blue sweater you always wore, the playlist we made together, the way you laughed with your whole body, as if you didn’t believe in half-measures. I wanted to say I’m sorry for the days when I disappeared, for not knowing how to hold your sadness, for being so caught up in my own fear that I couldn’t see yours.”
I don’t write about love directly, because I don’t know what word would fit. Maybe love is what remains after all the definitions have failed — an echo, a trace, a space where we once met. I circle the idea, never landing on it, afraid that naming it will reduce it to something smaller than it was.
“Do you ever think of those days?”
“Did you keep the photos, the messages, the inside jokes no one else would get?”
“Is there a version of us that could have survived if we had been braver, or just less tired?”
The letter becomes a landscape of absences: sentences unfinished, pages that want to be torn out, paragraphs that end mid-thought. I realize, in writing, that I am not really addressing him, but myself — the part of me that is still waiting for a reply, for closure, for some gentle permission to move on.
Roland Barthes asked: “What is a letter if not a conversation with absence?”
Every word I write is an attempt to meet him in the middle distance, to acknowledge that some stories only continue in silence.
I fold the letter, put it in a drawer I rarely open. I know I will never send it. But in writing it, something loosens — a knot in the chest, a script I no longer have to recite.
Perhaps the only letters worth writing are the ones we never send — the ones that teach us how to live with the echo, not the answer.
III. The Day When No One Came
“Loneliness is a place, not an absence.”
(Tove Jansson, paraphrase)
There are days whose details become etched in the memory not because something extraordinary happened, but because of what failed to happen. I remember that particular Tuesday as if it were a threshold: the day I waited for someone who would not come, the day the silence in my apartment expanded to fill every room. Two cups set out for coffee, bread sliced for two, a chair left pulled out as if for an invisible guest.
At first, I didn’t realize anything was different. I moved through my morning rituals, washed the dishes, glanced at the clock. It wasn’t until I caught myself listening for the sound of a key in the lock, a footstep in the hall, that I understood: this absence was not a brief pause, but a new presence. Loneliness had taken up residence, quietly, methodically, without apology.
I tried to distract myself — reading, cleaning, scrolling through newsfeeds. But the day dragged on, heavy with the weight of what wasn’t said, of messages not answered, of questions that had no addressee. I understood then that loneliness is not simply a lack; it’s a space that asks to be filled, a room that insists on being inhabited.
Tove Jansson wrote that loneliness is a place, not an absence. That day, I learned to navigate its contours: the shadow on the wall at dusk, the echo of my own footsteps, the small rebellion of not clearing the table for one. The rituals of togetherness became rituals of emptiness — acts of care with no recipient, gestures that circled back to me.
There was a strange tenderness in this new solitude. I discovered that missing someone is, in its own way, a form of love — one that does not seek an answer, that learns to live with the shape of what is missing.
By evening, I sat at the window, watching the city’s lights come on one by one. No message arrived, no knock at the door. Still, I felt a quiet gratitude: for the longing that remained, for the memories that had not soured, for the gentle ache that proved something real had once existed, even if now it was only a ghostly outline.
Perhaps emptiness is not a punishment, but a place to start again.
Perhaps the rooms we fill with absence are also the rooms where new stories will, one day, begin.
IV. Love That Never Closes
“The unfinished is what gives meaning to everything finished.”
(Rainer Maria Rilke, paraphrase)
Years pass. I move to another country, learn a new language, build a new relationship — a life that, on the surface, is both fuller and lighter. I meet Louis: we drink coffee in the kitchen at sunrise, bicker over grocery lists, fall asleep with our legs tangled together. There is happiness here, but it is not the happiness of forgetting. It is the happiness of learning to live with all that cannot be closed.
Sometimes, late at night, I remember that first love — the one I never truly said goodbye to, the one that lingers at the edge of every new beginning. I no longer expect a message or a sudden return. What remains is a soft ache, a space set aside inside me for what was unfinished.
Rilke wrote, “The unfinished is what gives meaning to everything finished.” I begin to understand: closure is not a necessity. Not every story requires a last word; not every love can be resolved into memory and nothing more. There are loves that remain unprocessed, not because of weakness, but because they refuse to be reduced to an ending. They persist as presence in absence, as a faint aftertaste in every new tenderness.
With Louis, I find a new vocabulary for love — one that includes space for what cannot be spoken, one that does not demand to replace what came before. We talk about our pasts in fragments, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in silence. We allow for the ghosts to linger, to pass through the rooms, to sit with us at the table now and then.
Perhaps this is what maturity is: the ability to love with the knowledge that not every absence must be filled, not every loss must be avenged, not every question needs an answer. To let the unfinished live beside what is finished — to welcome the echo as part of the conversation.
At the end of every letter I never sent, every conversation that never happened, there is a blank space — a place for the voice of someone else, or perhaps only for silence.
It is there that I leave my final word.
And maybe this, at last, is enough.
🇬🇧 Note to the Reader
“Unprocessed Love” is rooted in the Polish and Central European experience of loss, longing, and the unfinished. In Poland, stories of love and separation — especially queer love — are often marked by silence, the impossibility of closure, and a cultural tendency to leave certain things unsaid. Here, absence is not simply a void, but an active presence; what is unfinished is not a flaw, but a meaningful companion to what endures.
For readers outside this context, it may be helpful to know that in Polish culture, breakups and grief — especially in non-heteronormative relationships — are rarely discussed openly or “processed” in the therapeutic sense. Instead, the past often lives on as a subtle echo in everyday life: in empty cups, in unsent letters, in the rooms we fill with memory and longing. The unfinished is not something to be “fixed,” but something to be honored, accepted, and woven into the present.
I invite English-language readers to enter this text as an invitation to dwell in the gentle ambiguity between absence and presence, between what is spoken and what is left unsaid. Sometimes, the stories that remain open are the ones that teach us most about love, loss, and the spaces we carry inside us.
