Where Silence Lives

There are silences heavier than screams,

and others lighter —

gold dust drifting through the light

of a morning we never lived.

No one heard them,

and yet they were there —

between two words we never found,

between two glances too brief,

between two hearts out of rhythm.

Silences do not die.

They cling to the walls of empty rooms,

curl up in bedsheets,

sleep in the dust of closed books.

Some carry your name.

I know them by the way they pass through me —

without sound,

but never without trace.

I remember the silence of the departing train,

the silence after the sentence cut short,

the silence of the hand that never touched.

Each one left an imprint —

a precise, carved emptiness,

a contour around what might have been.

Perhaps we are made of these silences,

woven from absences,

shaped by all we could not say.

And perhaps it is there,

in the unseen part of us,

that true memory lives.

So I give thanks to all silences —

the ones I kept,

the ones I broke,

the ones I forgot.

I place them on an inner shelf,

smooth as stones worn down by time,

and sometimes, at night,

I hear them breathing softly,

as if to tell me,

"We existed, too."