The Space Between

Between the words we almost spoke, a curtain drawn—not quite a wall, but something held, the way breath suspends before the dive.

Your eyes find mine across the room and slip away like water through cupped hands. We sit in the architecture of restraint.

Outside, the street moves in its loud certainty. Inside, we are careful syllables, each one a choice not to say the thing that waits beneath the thing we're saying.

The silence isn't empty. It's crowded with what we've elected not to name— a room within the room, a second conversation happening in the space between.