The Unwritten Silences
Like breath in the air between us
I wake to the hum of morning,
a soft bruise spreading across the windows,
the light too thin, too
skeletal for any real
comfort. The weight of it presses,
like the hundred unread books
piled on my desk,
each spine a reminder
of things left unsaid.
I wear my failures
like an old coat,
familiar, worn at the elbows,
but the only thing keeping
the wind from cutting through.
The mirror has nothing to say today,
its reflection — a half-finished thought,
a fragment of a sentence that
never reached the page.
The coffee cools too quickly
in the cup I’ve used for years,
its porcelain chipped,
a flaw I’ve learned to love,
like the way I pretend
today will be different,
that I will sit down and write
something real.
Something that makes sense
of the words crammed behind my teeth.
There’s always a crack in the story,
a gap between what I want to say
and what the paper can hold.
Ink runs like blood, thick and
unsure,
the lines I scribble blur at the edges,
fall apart before I even
lift my hand from the page.
I think about
the characters who never lived,
the rooms I’ve built out of air,
their doors forever locked,
their windows sealed shut
because I could never finish
the story.
There’s a kind of violence
in half-truths,
in the way a word can be
left hanging,
its meaning trailing like a shadow,
never quite catching the light.
I wonder if I’m more real
on the page,
if my ink-self breathes
better than my skin-self,
if the me in the margins
has more to say than the me
in this chair,
in this room,
with the too-thin light
and the too-cold coffee.
I’ve always thought
the blank page was a kind of mirror,
reflecting back what we refuse to see.
But today it’s just white space,
empty,
silent.
A snowstorm that will not stop.
There’s no romance in it,
no poetic tragedy,
just the cold fact of it —
the sentences that won’t come,
the paragraphs that wither
before they’re born.
I used to think
if I could just find the right word,
the right image,
everything would click into place,
like the final piece of a puzzle
no one else could solve.
But now I know
there are some things
that refuse to be written.
I think about the lives
I’ve lived in these pages,
the rooms I’ve walked through,
the streets I’ve wandered,
all made of ink,
all as real as this room,
this morning.
Maybe that’s why I can’t
write it down —
the weight of too many lives,
too many voices,
all of them clamoring
for a space I no longer
know how to give.
But still, I sit.
I pick up the pen,
feel its familiar weight,
let it rest against the paper,
waiting.
I wonder if today will be the day
I break the silence,
if today the words
will finally speak,
if today I’ll finish the story
I’ve been writing
all my life.
Or maybe the silence
is the story,
the unwritten words
that hang like breath
in the air between us,
unspoken,
but still there.
Still real.
