The silence after the last curtain call

It’s 5:03 a.m. and the apartment still smells like stage dust—old, dry, like the inside of a forgotten music box. I sat on the edge of the bed for twenty minutes just listening to the way the quiet settles in, not empty but full of things that used to be loud. The body remembers the rhythm long after the mind forgets. Sometimes I think the injury didn’t end my dancing—it just made me stop pretending the stage was real.