Silence That Spoke

My phone screen cracked,

a frozen frame of a conversation never begun.

Your last message —

an emoji, empty as the space you left.

No goodbye, no thunderous crash,

just a slow fade, a quiet dissolve.

I scroll through threads like dusty books,

titles too worn to read aloud.

The silence between us grows thicker

than any word I could type or speak.

That blank space was the loudest sound:

your absence hammering down the quiet,

closing the book on a chapter

we never wrote.