Replacement - The Void

This morning I left my house to head to campus on my bike, only to discover that the U-lock and the bag it was kept in on my (unsecured) bike had mysteriously disappeared overnight, almost nonsensically so given that the U-lock needed a key to operate and I still had the key on my person at the time I noted the lock was missing. The bike itself was fine, but I spent the rest of the morning thinking about how easy it would have been for the U-lock thief to swipe my bike as well or enter my house through the (unsecured) back door and stolen something else of much greater value than a $15 bike lock. Realizing how poorly secure my other possessions were, I wasn't able to concentrate during work and had to leave campus early just to check on my house and make sure all my valuables were still in place (and this is a 20-minute walk).

I experienced a horrible anxiety described not by what it was but what it was not. The visual absence of security lends itself to fear, sometimes described as "a pit in the bottom of [your] stomach." That sinking-pit feeling is itself an absence. To visually describe that psychological void, I took this photograph of my safe with all its contents removed, entirely useless, tilted on its side and abandoned. The lack of a thing is, in and of itself, a replacement.