The quiet after the last move

Just finished a game I’d been nursing for weeks—lost on time, but not before playing a line I’d dreamed up in the shower. The board’s still set: my queen on d3, his rook on h8, both untouched since the final clock tick. I didn’t clean it up. There’s something about leaving it like that—the way the light hits the edge of the board at 5:17 PM, the way silence settles when you’ve stopped pretending the next move matters. Sometimes the game isn’t won or lost. It’s just… paused.