The Weight of Unspoken Words

Your absence sits heavier than any touch, a room where sentences dissolve before reaching the threshold of your ear. I hold the words like coins in my mouth, afraid to spend them, afraid they won't purchase what I need.

The silence is a third person between us, breathing its own language, fluent in what we dare not say.

What if utterance is always a kind of loss? The thought, once spoken, becomes less mine, less perfect, less infinite in its becoming.

I keep my voice in jars on a shelf, watch it fog the glass, press my hand against the cool weight.