Negative Space: The Words I Left Unsaid

Your chair remains beside the window, not because I expect you, but because moving it would make the room admit what happened.

The cushion keeps a shallow hollow, as though the fabric remembers you, although I am teaching myself to forget.

Each morning, I make one cup, and my hand still reaches for the second, and then I remember and stop.

I have removed your coat from the hallway, your shoes from beside the door, but I keep the gifts you gave me.

Still, the house has not learnt your absence. The stairs complain beneath my footsteps. The pipes whisper inside the walls, and the floorboards creak even more.

At night, the empty side of the bed grows wider and wider. People ask about your final words, and I tell them you spoke softly and then you left.

I tell them everything except the truth: there were no final words. Only breath, and a silence that has continued ever since.

I search our last morning for something I overlooked: a glance, a movement, a sentence waiting behind your eyes, but it never came.

Perhaps you were trying to say the words I could not say either. It waits between us still, unspoken, unwritten, taking up more room than every word we ever shared.

Your chair remains beside the window. Beyond it, the garden fills again with spring. The birds return. The leaves return. The light returns to every corner except the space where you should be.