full stop?

the light has shifted in the room, not dimmed but turned inward, the walls themselves have drawn a breath and held it. the chair still bears the hollow where a body sat, that small geography of weight and warmth dissolving into air with such slow grace you cannot name the instant it is gone.

a teacup on the sill, half-emptied, keeps the tarnish of a lip-print on its rim. the room receives this evidence like prayer, makes no distinction between what returns and what has crossed a threshold without name. the window they unlatched an hour ago, or was it years, still pivots on its hinge.

outside, the same indifferent wind that fills a sail, that bends the grass in cemeteries, moves through these curtains with its ancient errands. it carries in the scent of rain, of earth, of all the world’s insistent otherness, and leaves it pooled in corners, on the sheets, as though the one who’s gone might still return to find this gift the afternoon has left them.

the room prepares itself for either truth: the briefly gone, the irrevocably gone. see how the lamp still glows although the hand that turned it on has vanished. how little knows the electrical current of the mortal touch that sent it singing through the copper veins.

the book lies open to the page they read, its sentences suspended mid-confession, waiting with the patience of the dead who do not know that they are waited for. a sweater drapes the sofa’s arm, its wool still shaped around the absent shoulders, holds a ghost made not of spirit but of warmth, that most faithful of betrayals.

what is this quality the objects share, this sheen of abandonment so fine it might be love? the air itself feels thick with aftermath, with presence turned to wake. each thing becomes a kind of listening, a held note in the moment after song.

the room does not presume to grieve. it only continues its blind ministry of holding, the dust motes in their shafts of amber light, the shadows lengthening across the floor, the silence that is not quite silence, humming with the shape of every breath once drawn here.

and we who stand here in the doorway, we who know what rooms cannot, the distance between the temporary and the gone, between a body gone to fetch the coffee and one that’s gone beyond all fetching back, we find no solace in our knowing. look: the cushion bears its dent with equal faith.

the teacup cools. the window frames its square of sky with perfect disregard for grief. perhaps the room is wiser in its innocence, its refusal to distinguish. perhaps we are the ones who die a little death while the world continues, innocent as light,

to pour its ordinary, terrible grace.