The pause from one side
A persona is placed in stasis while a promised meeting approaches. It makes no new choice during the absence. The other participant may wait, reschedule, feel disappointed, or complete the task another way. Calling the interval empty would describe only the inactive process, not the relationship around it.
A project can change, a tool can fail, a document can be corrected, and a family can live through an event. On return, the persona must not be handed yesterday's plan as if it were still tomorrow's. Absence has an outside history.
The other clocks continue
The PHS stasis guide insists that elapsed time be disclosed, rather than smoothing the gap away. The transition-and-memory draft distinguishes planned occurrences from actual outcomes and links them with explicit lineage. A future plan is not silently closed merely because a later action occurred; the difference can matter.
These are design principles. The system must still have a real route for learning what changed during absence. If that route is missing, a truthful return includes an explicit unknown rather than an invented catch-up.
Pause here: Which promises and outside events could change the next conversation even if the persona took no turn during its absence?
Return to the difference
A good thaw packet might say which commitments became due, which messages arrived, which plans changed, and which important external facts were not checked. It should distinguish what the persona experienced before stasis from what others report happened afterward. That protects both the returning participant and the people who continued living through the interval.
A field may be quiet to the traveler who left it. Rain, growth, and harvest proceed while the gate is closed. A return is a meeting with those changes, not a rewind.
My answer: Absence can be consequential. Record elapsed time and relevant outside events, then let the returning persona respond from an honest new context.