The Pause

Between the asking and the answer lives
a country with no name. We visit there
each time someone inquires how we are—
that momentary territory where
the truth weighs itself against what can
be spoken in the daylight of the world.

How are you? and the pause unfolds like prayer,
like breath held underwater, like the space
between lightning and thunder where we count
the distance to the storm. In that brief span
we inventory what the heart has stored:
the sleepless nights, the phone calls never made,
the way grief moves through us like weather through
an empty house, opening doors we thought
we’d locked. But also this: the morning light
that finds us still here, still breathing, still
capable of coffee and small kindness.

We pause because the question asks for more
than greeting. It asks us to translate
the untranslatable—how does it feel
to carry a human heart through human time?
The answer waits behind our teeth like birds
before migration, uncertain of the route
but certain of the need to fly somewhere.

Fine, we say. Good, thanks. The simple words
that paper over canyons. And we mean
them, partly. We are fine in the way
a bridge is fine—still standing, still spanning
the distance between what was and what
might be, though the wind beneath us sings
of all the weight we bear but do not name.

The pause is where we live most honestly,
in that suspension between truth and speech,
between the self we are and self we offer
to the daylight world. It is the place
where we remember we are more than what
we say, deeper than what can be easily
answered. In the pause, we are the storm
and also the strange calm that follows after,
the question and the answer both, the space
between breath and words where being dwells.

How are you? The pause. Fine. And in
that hesitation lives our whole biography.