Omissions III

you don’t say it
but it rides shotgun anyway

window down, elbow out, that quiet between us doing all the talking like a highway that forgot where it was going

you ever notice that?

how a thing can live
without ever being born—just pacing the inside of your chest like a stray that found the door
but won’t come in —that’s us

you trim the truth
like a man shaving in bad light

leave just enough shadow to look like something real

and I sit there—feeling the weight of it

I become a sound you almost say and then don’t—and it echoes louder than if you had

that’s where I live with you

in the almost
in the inch before contact
in the breath you take
right before you decide not to cross it

and it’s not that you don’t feel it

I’ve seen it
in the way your voice slows down
like it’s trying not to wake something up

in the way you stay too long for a man who’s just passing through

you linger like a question you already know the answer to
but won’t ask

and me

I let it happen
I let the silence build a house around us
no doors
no windows
just walls made of everything we won’t admit

funny thing is
it feels warm in there

safe, almost

until it doesn’t

until you leave
and the air changes
and I’m standing in the middle of something
that never had a name

trying to explain to myself how something so present can still be missing

how a man can hold you
without ever really touching you

how omission
quiet, careful, deliberate omission

can feel more intimate
than truth

and here’s the part that stays

not you
you go, you always go
back to the life that has edges, definitions, doors that close

but this—this unfinished thing this almost this sentence that refuses its period

it lingers

in the coffee cup you didn’t finish
in the chair that still leans toward me
in the air that remembers the shape of your voice

and I

I finally see it for what it is

not love
not absence

but a corridor

long, dim, echoing
where we met halfway
and decided
without saying it

to never reach the end