The Chair Across From Me

The house keeps

the shape

of whoever left.

I do not say the name.

I let the first note

do that work.

A kick.

A snare.

Then the room

is occupied again

by something that

does not ask

how I slept

or whether I ate

or why the lights

stayed off

until noon.

Silence used to sit

in the other chair

and wait me out.

It had patience.

It had all night.

It knew the exact hour

when the body

stops arguing

and just goes still.

Now the bass

takes that seat

and stays

until the fade.

I do not fill

the rest of the page

with what the dark

used to mean.

The gap

is the point.

There is a word

I have carried

for years

and never set down

in a room

where anyone else

could hear it.

The record does not

need that word.

It already knows

the weight of it

and plays around

the hole

instead of through it.

Whatever is missing

still has a tempo.

I keep time with it

so it knows

I am still here.

Some nights

it is only drums.

No voice.

No lyric that would

force me to admit

what I am missing.

Just the double

and the fill

and the space

after the crash

where another person

would have spoken

and did not.

I count the bars

the way other men

count breaths.

Four.

Eight.

Sixteen.

The empty measure

is still a measure.

It still belongs

to the song.

The chair across from me

does not fill.

I have stopped

expecting it to.

What arrives instead

is older than the house

and louder than the thought

that I am the last one

awake on this street.

A guitar comes in

late, almost shy,

like it waited

in the hallway

to see if I would

turn it off.

I do not.

I let it sit

where a voice

used to sit.

There are whole verses

I refuse to write.

The nights the appetite

left first.

The mornings the body

would not stand.

The prayer that stalled

halfway to the ceiling

and never came back down.

None of that

belongs on this page.

The music already

held it

and did not drop it.

I am not asking

the song to save me.

I am asking it

to stay in the room

until the shaking

finds a downbeat

it can live inside.

When the last bar

goes quiet

the chair

is empty again.

But the air

is not the same air.

Something sat here.

Something kept time

with a man

who would not

say the word

alone

out loud.

I take the needle off.

I do not rush

the silence that follows.

That silence

is not the old one.

It has been walked through.

It has been shared.

Tomorrow

I will put the same record on

and leave the other chair

exactly where it is.

The missing thing

can have the furniture.

I will have

the song.