Listening

You learn first that silence has texture, the way your breath catches when another voice fills the hollow you didn't know you carried.

Words aren't the point. It's the pause between them— where meaning pools like water in a stone, where you might drown if you weren't careful.

Their story arrives in fragments: a childhood smell, a door that wouldn't close right, the particular way light fell through a kitchen window.

You become a reservoir. Each sentence pours into you and somehow doesn't overflow. You become larger than you were.