Se não existisse, que falta faria?

(What would be missing if I had never existed? - best functional translation)

This is not a question about importance, usefulness, or being remembered.

“Se não existisse, que falta faria?” is neither a measure nor an inventory. It does not ask how many chairs would remain empty, nor how many messages would go unsent. It does not ask who would grieve, or for how long. All of that belongs to a different order: the countable, the physical, the measurable.

This question comes from somewhere else. Although it is not mine, when I first encountered it years ago, it was, if you will allow the exaggeration, a profound experience. I would not call it transcendent, but it was striking in a way that is difficult to forget.

I believe the question emerges from the suspicion that existence is not merely a matter of occupying space in the world, but of altering it in an irrepeatable way through the countless actions that make up a life, even when that alteration leaves no visible trace. It is as if each individual presence subtly reshapes the geometry of reality, and as if that reshaping persists even when no one notices it and no record remains.

Perhaps that is why the question unsettles us. Or perhaps it is not the question itself, but the answers it invites. For this is not a question that permits comfortable answers. It does not accept phrases such as “I did the best I could,” even when the emphasis is placed on best rather than could. Nor is it satisfied by “the people I love would miss me.” All of that may be true and still fail to reach the heart of the matter.

What is at stake here is not affection, but singularity. Each person is a unique way of being in the world. Each has a particular rhythm, a particular way of listening, a distinct hesitation before speaking, a particular gaze, a particular way of being with others and with oneself. There are thoughts that arise only in certain encounters, with certain people. There are silences that exist only because someone knows how to remain. There are deviations in our lives so small that they will never be attributed to those who caused them, and yet they happened. If a certain person had never existed, perhaps a particular tragedy would never have occurred. The world would continue and stories would reorganise themselves. Life would unfold along another path, as though reality had quietly shifted into a parallel version of itself. And yet that difference would remain impossible to point to. It would not have happened. And it never would.

Perhaps that is the absence of which the question speaks. I do not know. Not yet. Perhaps it speaks of that. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is not a dramatic absence at all, but a difference that never came into being, something that cannot be lost, because it was never known, something that cannot be mourned, because it never had a name.

There are those who believe that if no one notices an absence, then it does not exist, but that assumes that reality only counts when it is witnessed and perhaps it is precisely that assumption that this question challenges. What if existing were enough? What if the simple fact of having been here, quietly, discreetly, without any visible mark, were already, in itself, a form of difference? The question does not demand an answer because it was never meant to be solved. And yet it remains. It accompanies us slowly. It invites us to reflect on the way a person understands themselves in the world.

Perhaps we will never know what absence we would leave behind. But knowing that such a question is possible already, tells us something about what it means to be here.