The husband’s favourite section of the Tao Te Ching is about the space between things. A bowl is only useful because of the space within it, same with a doorway, or an open path.

Sometimes he thinks that the space between him and his wife is the only thing that’s keeping them together.

The wife tells him that Shanghai gets darker and darker this time of year. Neon lights cannot make up for the onset of rain, and yet still, she counts the raindrops as they fall on her windowsill.

Falling raindrops vary in size between 0.1 and 6mm in diameter. As they fall, the heavier raindrops catch up to the smaller ones, merging together. It is this exact process of merging together however, that causes the raindrops to break apart again.

When they first met, the wife told him that her heart was a snow globe that could be shattered by the faintest blow of the wind. He told her to stay away from open windows, mountains and hurricanes. “Which one are you?” she asked.

They spent weekends touring art galleries together, pretending to be a wealthy couple hunting for that one piece to hang above the mantelpiece. They would stand and admire the artworks, drinking champagne in one hand, with their fingers interlocked in the other. Love in those early days was only ever a matter of touch, eye contact, and innuendo. Nothing needed to be said. It would be grotesque to say it out loud.

In one exhibition, old film posters hung on the wall, selling tickets to screenings that no longer existed. What was originally a form of advertising had become a work of art. The difference between the ads and the art was the film company that had gone out of business in between.

Sometimes on a cold winter evening, the wife would sit by the reading nook at their windowsill. As her breath fogged up the glass, the outside world gave way, until it was just the two of them in a faint outline in the reflection.

“I miss spending time with you,” he said one evening, their lips merely inches apart. It was later that evening that her hand no longer reached out for his. They were in a rooftop bar, overlooking the smog of the city. He was repeating the same joke, lost in translation, as her mind left him.

The husband visits a close friend, a musician of some renown. The musician tells him that Beethoven believed “no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” During his later life, Beethoven gradually lost his sense of hearing until he went deaf. To compose new music, he had to imagine the notes as he remembered them sounding. Composing new music became a practice of reaching further and further back into the past.

Sometimes the husband thinks that this is the key to fixing their broken relationship. If only he can reach back far enough into the past, then maybe he will start to hear the music again.

When he first got the job offer, he turned it down. Denmark was too far away, and besides, he would miss the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. The second time he got the offer, he accepted.

Maybe it would do them some good to spend time apart. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” he had read somewhere. The real quote was from a Roman poet named Sextus Aurelius Propertius: “Always toward absent lovers love’s tide stronger flows.”

He remembers what Tanizaki writes In Praise of Shadows: “If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot.”

The wife tells him that the raindrops are getting heavier outside, breaking apart relentlessly on their windowsill, scattering the light of the red lanterns on the pavement. There is nowhere to hide anymore, water is falling through holes in the ceiling. She is running out of buckets.

ABSENCE, the program is called, and hosted at the University of Copenhagen. The researchers want to understand the role absence plays in everyday communication. How much is left unsaid by omission and innuendo, and how can that logic be given to machines? Sometimes the most important part of a sentence is the thing not said out loud. This is what the husband writes down in his notebook, which he promptly loses the next day.

The husband tells her that Copenhagen is brighter and brighter this time of year. The coldness of strangers cannot hide its natural beauty; the seagulls landing on mermaid tails and the cyclists taking the long road out to the sea.

When he walks down that long road to the Louisiana gallery, he discovers a photo exhibition of old, cracked faces in a beautiful white room. The gallery café has pristine sandwiches, a green sloping lawn and young women with blonde hair. It is this contrast that he cannot yet understand. The old women and the young women, standing side by side.

“Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for one’s past that can improve one’s psychological state,” he reads in a journal, “We hypothesized that it does so, at least in part, via authenticity, a sense of alignment with one’s true self. We obtained support for this hypothesis in four studies.” He spends the rest of the evening imagining these studies. Then he remembers their first kiss.

It was on the cusp of twilight as the lamplight began to glow. She was pressed into his shoulder. “It’s a full page spread on Shanghai poets. I can’t believe it. I never get anything accepted,” she said. As her eyes dipped to the page, his lips brushed up against hers. A hint of surprise rippled through her, replaced by a hunger and longing.

The phone rings.

“I need to apologize,” the wife says.

“For what?” he asks.

She bursts into tears.

A human tear is roughly 0.2mm in diameter, meaning that it can perfectly disappear in the rain. People who avoid close personal relationships have been shown to cry less often. But personal relationships are often said to be the only way to find meaning in life.

Walking through the graveyard of Copenhagen’s greatest writers, a professor points out to the husband the grave of Søren Kierkegard. “Kierkegard believed that despair reveals a lack of self-understanding, or a gap within the self. The more one understands themselves, the greater the gap and therefore, the greater that despair.” The husband leaves a dignified pause, before asking the logical question. “Is it that obvious?”

When Beethoven finally lost his sense of hearing, he would sit down at the piano feeling for the vibration of the strings whenever he pressed down on a key. The husband considers this image of Beethoven, learning to understand what sound /feels/ like. He cannot decide if it is tragic or glorious.

Sometimes he wonders if he will ever feel anything for her again. The numbness is not just an absence of emotion, it is the absence of sensation, it is the absence of sound.

The Japanese concept of ma refers to a pause in time or empty space. Symbolically, it combines the alphabet character for light with the character for a door. It is used to describe the white space in a traditional Japanese painting, or the spacious nooks in a house, or the moment when a film stops for the characters to breathe and watch the scenery in between the action.

“Love has very little to do with sunsets, roses, or physical movement,” the wife told him on their third or fourth date, “Love is as practical as changing a tire, moving houses, or assembling an IKEA bed. You just have to find the right peg for the right hole.” He considers this analogy during her second apology.

The husband boards the plane and waits those long few minutes for it to creep above the clouds. Above the clouds, there is no rain anymore. The world is split into lightness and darkness. He takes off his wedding ring to stretch his finger, feeling the absence as a weight upon his skin.

The wife calls him as soon as he lands.

He doesn’t answer her immediately.

The wife calls.

The wife calls.

The wife calls.

He accepts.