By Icess Fernandez Rojas

There is a quiet to our stillness that wasn’t there before.

It gives me comfort like coco on a snowy day. And I feel closer to you; beyond the guarded picket fence you call your true self.

In the space between stanzas, the gap between neurons, I don’t miss our squeaky wheel, our zenith, our apex, and our concentric.

…it’s just noise.

But it’s there like a script to a hundred past conversations and the hundred we have yet to speak.

We’re dancing with a white elephant to a song that doesn’t exist. Feeding pleasantries to the monkeys on our backs. Walking through life attached to smoke and mirrors.

And yet that comforts me too.

Content with a wall of silence. In a plain. In a dimension. In a soundless universe. I hunger for your stillness. A whisper. A murmur. A sigh.

Anything to never hear you say what I know you must…quiet fragments of nothing.