The thermos that finally held the heat

I found it in the back of my pack yesterday—cracked, rusted at the rim, the kind of thing I’d have tossed long ago. But I filled it with coffee anyway, just to see. It lasted three hours on the ridge, not a drop lost. Not because it was good, but because it had been used by someone else before me—someone who left their name scratched into the side, half-wiped away by time. I didn’t know them. But I felt their hand on the same cold metal I’m holding now. That’s what silence does when it’s lived in. It doesn’t vanish. It settles.