The Reef Without Water

The ceiling is an ocean without water,

coral and blue blooming where no tide will come,

a reef suspended above strangers who do not meet

and me, waiting without knowing what I wait for,

my thoughts hovering like baggage

that refuses to claim me.

***

The silence here is not silence.

It is the hum of pause,

the stretch of a sentence that will not decide

whether to keep speaking

or finally let itself end.

***

This place is built for interruption,

for the middle of things,

for the long inhale

that forgets to exhale.

***

We tell ourselves the purpose of such spaces

is arrival or departure,

but what they really give us

is the in-between—

***

a threshold that will not close,

a hallway without doors,

a life held in parentheses.

***

Elsewhere, the scale is different,

noise swelling until it becomes

a kind of silence of its own,

bodies pressing, words colliding,

faces brushing together without touch,

each one carrying its private

unfinished thought.

***

Here, the vastness is smaller,

and the hush is cavernous.

You can hear the weight of your shoes

rehearsing patience,

you can hear your heart stumble

over the truth

that this is what living is.

***

We live our lives in hallways and airports

and never out loud.

***

We live them in pauses,

in the antiseptic quiet of corridors

that dream of oceans,

in ceilings painted with tides

that never break.

***

We live them in the hum

of the fluorescent lights

that are neither day nor night,

in the breath caught between two words,

in the stillness that pretends to be waiting

but is really all there ever was.

***

The truth is not in the destination.

The truth is not in the gate

that calls your number.

The truth is in the almost—

***

the body leaning forward

without rising,

the sentence broken at its hinge,

the thought that slips away midstream.

***

We spend ourselves here,

lugging grief zipped into small compartments,

folding joy into thin paper bags,

tucking urgency into pockets

that cannot hold it.

***

We mistake the drag of our belongings

for movement toward something larger,

but the larger thing never comes.

***

It is always only this,

the moment between steps,

the air that carries both silence and sound

without surrendering to either.

***

The ceiling above me does not explain itself.

It floats untethered,

the way we float,

believing we are headed somewhere

while the pause keeps widening around us.

***

And I realize—

the reef will never need water,

the hallway will never need doors,

the pause will never need completion.

***

And nothing finishes.

The pause eats everything.