Silence Has Grain

Silence has grain— rough-edged, like wood you must smooth with your palm, or soft as fresh snow before footprints.

The kind of silence between two people who have nothing left to prove gathers thick as fog in a valley.

But the silence after argument is sharp. It splinters. It cuts the way glass cuts air— clean edges, invisible danger.

I taste it sometimes at dawn— that silence before birds remember their names, before the city wakes. It is sweetest then, almost forgiveness.