Abandoned crossword

Coffee stains blur the ink,

pencil lines fade on the page.

Squares left empty like gaps

in a conversation cut off too soon.

Clues half-answered, waiting

for a hand that never came back,

a quiet page caught between thought

and distraction, lost in the static

of a dying phone.

The puzzle waits—unsolved, unsettled—

a map to nowhere, a story

left hanging in the margins,

words I almost found but didn’t.