The Quiet That Holds You

The phone rings and the sound feels like a hand reaching for your throat. You are too fragile to speak, too thin to hold a conversation without breaking.

The world expects an answer, but your voice has gone silent. In that moment, the light does not demand your words.

It sits with you in the quiet, honoring the exhaustion that makes speech impossible. There is a bruised reed it will not break, and a smoldering wick it will not snuff out—you are that reed, that wick.

You do not have to perform strength for the light to stay. It knows the depth of your silence better than you know the sound of your own name.

The ringing stops, and the quiet returns, not as an absence, but as a holding.