The Silence Between Words

We speak in fragments, leaving whole rooms of meaning unfinished.

Your breath catches on the edge of confession— I see the words hover, then dissolve like salt on the back of my tongue.

In that pause, a world reconstructs itself: everything you almost said, everything I almost believed.

The space grows vast, a canyon between two cliffs of sound, and I am learning to live in that echoing dark, to read the grammar of what remains unsent.

Perhaps we are kindest to each other in the words we swallow, the sentences we let die before they break the air.