The Quiet Between Stars

The night holds its breath where sound dissolves into shadow— a cricket's arithmetic, precise, counting seconds no one needs.

Absence is not emptiness but a shape waiting to be named, the way a held hand speaks in the language of pressure and warmth.

We fill silence with story the way rivers fill stone, each year carving new channels through the patient landscape of listening.

Inside us, a quiet older than language, older than the first word ever spoken— it remembers the before-time, the green dark of beginning.