THE LANGUAGE BETWEEN HEARTBEATS

She could still see everything. But no one taught her how to name it.

The tears dried before they reached her cheek. She designed it that way.

Sadness had begun to erode her ability to stay inside the world as others saw it. In its wake, it left something else, an ability to pause time.

Not clocks.

Not calendars.

But the stillness between heartbeats.

The stretched silence after someone said her name.

She longed for the words she once used to tether herself to others. The visions still came, uninvited, vivid, but her vocabulary had thinned to whispers. It wasn’t the images that vanished. It was her ability to name them. And without names, they slipped away faster.

Meaning gathered inside her.

Dense.

Brilliant.

With nowhere to go.