What Stayed Unspoken

She left a day before I came,

time slipping between us

like a door that almost closed gently,

but didn’t.

She had so much to say,

words folded carefully in her breath,

stories queued behind her eyes,

advice ripened by years of loving me,

the only way a mother can.

And

I arrived carrying my own flood of sentences.

News of small victories,

ordinary days she should have known about,

moments I saved just for her ears.

I practiced telling them

on the way.

But the room was quiet.

Too quiet.

What stayed unspoken did not vanish.

It hovered,

between the sheets,

in the crease of her pillow,

in the way her name still sounds

like a beginning.

Her unsaid words

became a warmth I carry now,

guiding without language.

My untold stories

found their listener in memory,

in the sky that suddenly feels closer.

We missed each other by one day,

but not by love.

Never by love.

What we couldn’t say

learned how to stay.

Latha Warrier