Silent Cargo

We carry what we cannot name— the weight of light through curtains, salt from conversations we forgot we had.

There are rooms inside us where nobody knocks, dust settling on words we meant to finish, on the names of flowers we almost learned.

What's the color of almost? What's the sound of a door that was never opened? We know it— in the quickening of breath, in the way our hands remember gestures that were never made.

The air is full of these things: unspoken apologies, the taste of words held between teeth, the shape of touch that existed only as longing.

We are all museums of the half-lived, cathedrals of the nearly said.