What Remains Between the Words

The pause before you speak— that held breath where nothing yet has broken the skin of silence.

Your hand hovering above mine, distance measured in the warmth we're both too careful not to share.

Windows after rain, each drop a mirror that has given up its reflection, running clear.

What lives in margins, in the white space of a page, in the echo after music stops—

this is where we learn to listen, where absence becomes a shape we can finally hold.