Moth-shaped Null

If you ask why I began here, on the ruined paper and under the first blue of July, I will tell you about the comet that passed above Zurich the year I was born—how it left no ash, only a memory that won’t settle. This piece grew from that kind of absence: not a surface waiting to receive, but one already wounded and receding. I left the studio open to the morning—let the condensation mark its own brief calendar, the residue of departure. Every act after—the heat of the iron, the slow brush of wax—felt like an inadequate attempt to preserve what the sun would soon obliterate. The moth is only a gap: a shape made by what has fled. There’s hope, maybe, in the way the mineral traces glow against the damage, like relics found in a collapsed reliquary. Some things insist on persisting, even if only as a negative. I am not interested in resolving this—only in holding the fracture at dawn, before it vanishes. When people ask what was lost, I tell them about the comet again, and I am no closer to the answer.