I feel her enter:
a velvet hush,
the absence that sits beside me
when the house is quiet
and the air tastes old.
Nothing does not threaten,
or beg for attention.
She waits for the lights to die;
for my questions to thin
into silence.
She is not pain, not loss,
not even memory’s ghost.
She is the black behind each thought.
The space a body relinquishes
when it walks out of a room
for the last time.
No heaven, no warning
just the clean erasure.
The mellifluous slip
behind every closed door.
The measureless hush that waits
when the heart is done.
It is Nothing I fear.
Her soft suffocation
comes for us, one at a time.
Too kind to kill, but too still to bear.