Threshold of Echoes

In the pause between heartbeats, a crow calls across the valley— one sound that multiplies itself against the sleeping pines.

We are always entering rooms we've already left. The light bends differently each time: softer here, more blue, weighted with the dust of months we cannot name.

Your voice echoes in my chest long after you've stopped speaking, the way a bell rings in the cathedral of a closed museum, where no one is listening.

I collect these silences the way others keep photographs— careful, in a drawer lined with lavender, each one more precious because it ends.