What Remains

A room holds the shape of your leaving— dust motes still wheeling through the shaft of afternoon light where your shadow was, where you were, the air remembering your breath.

The silence doesn't fill the space. It becomes the space. I learn to read the negative, how absence is a language too, the way forgetting teaches us to listen.

Your coffee cup sits unwashed, a small rebellion against time. I could wash it. But then what would prove you were here?

So I leave it. Let the rim hold your lipstick, let the stain deepen into geography. Some things we don't erase— we map them. We become explorers of the ordinary ruins.