The Threshold

Dust motes drift through the afternoon window— each one carrying the weight of something unsaid, a conversation that began and never ended.

You stand in doorways like a question mark, half in shadow, half in the amber of leaving. The house holds its breath around you.

Outside, the birds have learned to sing in silence, their songs written in the curve of wing, in the space between takeoff and landing.

Some mornings, light arrives before the sun, testing the edges of rooms you thought you knew, finding the places where the walls are thinnest.

We keep our words in jars on the shelf— careful, labeled, never opened. The glass grows cloudy with all that remains.