Untethered

Your voice arrives before you do, a shimmer across still water— I reach and the surface breaks.

The room holds its breath between sentences. Dust turns in the afternoon light, each particle a small forgetting.

I wanted to say something that mattered, but the words kept their distance, like animals at the edge of a clearing.

What we don't speak becomes the architecture of what remains— careful silences, loaded pauses, the weight of a hand on a table.