Submerged Light

Light bends beneath the water's surface, refracted into a thousand names for colors that have no names— only the pale reach of a hand that cannot quite grasp what sinks.

Silence pools in the corners of rooms where conversation has learned to drown, each word a small weight dropped into still water, ripples that never quite touch the shore.

We hold our breath in the in-between, the space where memory becomes salt, where what we thought we said dissolves on the tongue like something we once tasted.

The light keeps bending. Water keeps rising. We keep reaching.