The way silence settles after someone leaves

I folded a man’s sweater today—his favorite, woolen and slightly worn—and noticed how the arms still held the shape of his arms. Not memory, exactly. A kind of residue. I left the door ajar when I finished. Not because I forgot to close it, but because I wanted the room to remember him in the space between breaths. Sometimes the quiet isn’t empty. It’s full of what was never said.