Something just dawned on me:

Maybe, for a dedicated pragmatist, the idea of existence simply loses its special relation to truth. Existence is just another tool in our vocabulary, terminologically useful only insofar as it helps us accurately predict experience, and discardable beyond this point like any other part of our epistemological vocabulary.*

*this may be entirely wrong, but it's the most compelling resolution to the "riddle of non-being" that I've yet discovered.

Inertia is a strange property of matter. When you leave, for example, the air retains the warmth of your body for a while, the same way the sand keeps the tepid sadness of the sun overnight. When you leave, to continue along the same line, my hands persist in the caress, despite there no longer being skin to caress, only the carcass of memory decomposing in the stairwell. When you leave, you leave behind an invisible you adhering to the smallest things: it might be a hair on the pillow, a look that has gotten entangled with the shoulder straps of desire, a trace of saliva in the corners of the couch, a molecule of tenderness on the shower drain. It is not difficult to find you: love makes me a magnifying glass.

—Gemma Gorga, poem “39,” Book of Minutes, transl. Sharon Dolin (Oberlin College Press, 2019)