“Things I Never Let Leave My Mouth”

I held you in the spaces I never spoke, in the pauses where my courage broke, where every truth I almost said lay folded tight inside my head. You stood there like a distant shore, close enough to reach the door, but I was made of quieter things of hesitation’s delicate strings. And I swear I meant to let it show, to let you see what I don’t show, but silence has a way of staying when it knows you’re afraid of saying what might undo the fragile thread that holds the weight of what I left unspoken in the drifting air, as if it never lived in there. So it became the way I breathe, a kind of grief I couldn’t leave, a constant ache, a softer burn, a place I always had to turn when I replay the almost said, the living ghosts inside my head, each one a door I didn’t try to open when you passed me by. And I am haunted, not by loss, but by the cost of what I crossed out of the future we once knew when I still thought I’d speak to you. And I swear I meant to let it fall, to break the quiet, risk it all, but something kept me still instead the things I never let be said.