“Whispers Between the Lines”

Whispers Between the Lines

By [Ali REhman]

Lena had always believed that words could save people.

They had saved her once — long before she ever learned to write them.

As a child, she would sit beneath her grandmother’s window, listening to the old woman hum songs that carried no lyrics, only feeling. Those were the first poems she ever knew — poems of silence and breath. Years later, when her grandmother was gone and her house was empty, Lena found that she could still hear those songs in the quietest corners of her mind.

Now, she was a poet. But not the kind who stood on stages or filled shelves. She wrote in the margins of library books, on the backs of receipts, inside matchboxes, and sometimes on the steamed-up mirror after a shower. Words were everywhere — but what mattered most were the spaces between them.

Her readers often said her poems felt unfinished. They weren’t wrong. Lena never wanted to finish them. She believed the truest things were never said outright. They were only felt, like whispers between the lines.

She lived in a small apartment above a used bookstore — the kind that smelled of paper and old rain. The owner, Mr. Rowan, let her stay cheap as long as she helped organize books. She liked the way the floorboards creaked when she walked, as though the building itself was sighing with her.

Each morning, she would descend the narrow stairs, unlock the glass door, and flip the little sign that read “Open, if you’re looking for something you don’t know yet.”

One day, a man entered just as the rain began. He was tall, carrying a notebook bound in leather and the kind of eyes that looked like they were holding back storms. He didn’t browse. He went straight to the poetry section and pulled out a thin book — one of hers.

Lena froze. She’d published that book years ago under a pseudonym — Eloise Miren. Few people had even noticed it.

He turned a few pages, his lips moving silently, then stopped. “This one,” he said suddenly, breaking the quiet. “This poem doesn’t end.”

Lena blinked, unsure whether to reveal herself. “Maybe it’s not supposed to,” she said softly.

He smiled faintly. “I’ve been trying to finish it for years.”

They began to meet often after that — sometimes in the shop, sometimes at the little café down the street where the cups were chipped but the coffee was kind. His name was Aiden. He was a musician, or at least he had been before silence found him too.

He told her he’d lost someone once — a sister, perhaps, or a version of himself — and after that, music stopped making sense. He came to the bookstore not to find words, but to remember how they felt.

Lena didn’t ask questions. She only listened.

Together, they filled the quiet with things that didn’t need to be said.

He would hum melodies that never resolved.

She would write poems that never ended.

Between them, there was a strange kind of peace — the kind that comes when two broken languages learn to understand each other.

One night, after the shop closed, they sat on the floor surrounded by scattered books and half-drunk tea. Aiden opened her poetry book again. “You know,” he said, tracing the blank space at the bottom of the page, “this silence feels heavier than the words.”

Lena nodded. “That’s where the truth lives.”

He looked at her then, with a softness that made time stop. “What does this one mean?” he asked, pointing to a poem that read:

The rain doesn’t fall to be heard.

It falls because it remembers.

She smiled. “It means that sometimes, we speak not to be understood — but to remember who we are.”

He closed the book slowly. “Then I suppose silence is how we remember what we’ve lost.”

Weeks passed, and Aiden stopped coming. At first, Lena thought it was the rain again — it always made the city smaller, lonelier. But days became weeks, and she realized he wasn’t returning.

Then one morning, she found an envelope tucked into the poetry shelf. It had her name written on it in a familiar, trembling hand.

Inside was a page torn from her own book. Across the blank space at the end of one unfinished poem, he had written a single line:

Thank you for teaching me how to hear silence again.

And beneath it, in faint pencil — a few musical notes, incomplete, waiting for her to finish them.

Lena didn’t cry. Instead, she took out her pen and wrote a reply in the same space:

And thank you for showing me that silence can sing.

She placed the page back on the shelf. From that day on, whenever someone bought her book, she would slip a blank sheet inside — a quiet invitation for the reader to write something of their own.

Because Lena had finally learned what her grandmother’s wordless songs had always meant:

Poetry isn’t what you write.

It’s what you leave behind.

Moral:

Sometimes, silence says more than words ever could. Between every line we write, every breath we take, and every unspoken goodbye — there’s meaning waiting to be heard. The heart always speaks, even when the mouth cannot.