Not knowing how

It lingers in the spaces left, a weight too light to call a stone, too heavy to ignore. It moves between the careful words, the ones we say but never mean, the ones we mean but never say. I start, then stop. You breathe, then turn. As if the thing between us lives on silence, fed by all the ways we almost reach but never touch. A sentence forms, then folds itself. back into quiet, like a wave that never reaches the shore.