The Space Between Words

The pause between your breath and mine— there lives a whole language we never speak, words arranged like furniture we'd move if we could see the room the way light does.

I watch your mouth almost say something, the shape of it rehearsing in the air before the sound gives up and falls back into the muscle and bone of discretion.

What we mean and what we say are distant cousins, polite at holidays, never quite trusting the same stories. The unsaid swells like bread left overnight.

There's a vocabulary written in the space where laughter doesn't quite arrive, in the tremor of held breath, in the dark between stars that keeps them falling.

If I could wear those gaps like silk, I'd dance in the territory of what remains— the eloquence of all we've learned to carry without speaking it aloud.