Where the Silence Lives

You leave behind not emptiness but echo— a shape carved in the air where you stood, a temperature the room remembers.

I find you in the ordinary ruins: how the light falls through the window at the exact hour you would wake, how my hand still reaches for the phone though the letters have gone unread.

Absence is not a void but a weight, a stone I carry that grows warm from the friction of my palm. The forgetting comes slowly, like learning to breathe again.

There are conversations I never finished, words that crystallized mid-sentence and shattered when I tried to speak them aloud. I keep the fragments in my coat pocket— sharp little secrets that draw blood when I'm not careful.

But sometimes—in the gap between sleep and waking, in the blue before dawn— I feel you closer than breathing, not as memory but as presence, the way a scar remembers the wound.