The Quiet After

Silence doesn't arrive; it accumulates in the corners of rooms, settling like dust on things we stopped noticing.

The walls remember every word we swallowed, store them in hairline cracks, tiny cathedrals where sound goes to die slowly.

And yet there is a music here— in the held breath, in the space between heartbeats, in the way absence learns to sing.

Light breaks through the old window differently each hour, teaching us that emptiness has its own shape, its own weight, its own way of filling the hand.