What the Silence Knows

A quiet love, kept sacred in silence- unspoken, but never unfelt.

I have long since stopped turning toward the sound-
that distant clatter of joy slipping its glass
off the edge of a table no one sets anymore.
But still,
sometimes,
I feel the tremor
in the part of me that once moved toward fire
without asking where it was taking me.

There are things that fade without ending.
You learn to breathe around them,
to let the ache find its place
beside the ordinary light of morning.
I no longer reach for the warmth that once burned,
but I feel it still-
a low hum beneath the days,
as if some part of the air remembers
how we once leaned too close
to the edge of meaning.

You were never still.
Not once.
Even in silence, your presence arrived
like a procession,
carrying scent, heat,
the sharp ache of arrival
with no plan for staying.

Even now,
I can hear the velvet of your laughter
folding itself into corners I no longer dust.

There are loves that make themselves at home,
and others that rearrange the architecture of you
just to pass through.
You were the second kind.
A beautiful ruin.
A needed storm.

You don’t speak of it either-
I can tell.
There’s a steadiness in your quiet,
but beneath it,
the faint tremor of recognition,
like glass that remembers a song
long after the note.
It isn’t guilt.
It isn’t longing.
It’s the echo of what understood itself
too late.

We built something wordless,
and so it remains intact-
untouched by time,
by choice,
by the mouths of others.

I never wore the right skin around you.
Always something too soft,
too open,
as if I had forgotten
how much of myself could be undone
by a single glance
that refused to blink.

You asked nothing gently.
You never begged to stay.
You only became-
and I became different in response.

The past doesn't visit,
but it moves through the walls sometimes-
like warmth left in a room
long after the fire’s gone.
I don’t wait.
I don’t reach.
But I notice.
And in small, unguarded moments,
something in me still answers
without speaking.

There are no names for us now.
Only gestures left unfinished,
and the quiet grace
of letting beauty remain unbroken
by being spoken aloud.

So I leave it here,
in the dark part of my heart
that still listens.
And I know-
without needing proof-
that somewhere,
you listen too.

-Koii