The Space Between Speaking

There's a word that lives in the palm of the moment just before speaking— glowing, not yet named, like light that hasn't decided which color it wants to become.

The mouth opens. The word dissolves. What emerges wears the shape of intention but carries the texture of approximation. We are always saying something else than what we meant.

I've learned to read the silence between words, the small spaces where meaning collects like water in a cupped hand. It's there, in the not-said, where the real conversation happens.

We are all translating the untranslatable— pouring experience into grammar, watching it leak at the edges, arriving at other people as something both true and incomplete.

Still. We try. Still. We speak.