Say you’re writing about someone who is not around. Say you are writing about someone that some others have lost in one way or another. (There are so very many ways of losing someone.) As I see it, you have two ways of approaching this.

The first image illustrates one way of doing it. (Image by Charles Cohen.) Someone can disappear and leave a gaping hole shaped just like themselves.

This second image is by a Seattle artist named John Haddock. It is also a picture of someone who is not there. Haddock takes images from the web—pornographic images—and erases the nude figure from the image, replacing it by drawing the patterns of the bedspread, the color of the wall, the features of the room. After the character has been erased, the hole has been filled in.

Try them both. Write something about a person who is gone. In one version, leave the gaping hole. In the other, fill the hole in so it is almost like the person was never there.