“it’s almost like you’re listening for something that isn’t there,” someone murmured, and it stuck, a little burr under the skin of my mind, because I AM listening, constantly, for the phantom notes between the thrum of the fridge and the distant Brooklyn siren, not for an answer, never really for an answer anymore, but for the echo of the question itself, the resonance of what ISN'T spoken, the way the bare walls of my apartment hold the ghost of a million conversations I’ll never hear, and the heat from this laptop against my legs just grounds me in this one solitary point of being, a tiny anchor in the vastness of the unasked, letting the questions spiral in my head, just like the coils of smoke from my whiskey neat, each one a tendril exploring a corner of thought I hadn't noticed needed airing, those invisible currents behind the everyday hum of the bodega's constant glow, not trying to catch them, just letting them flow over and through, witnessing the sheer existence of them, this current of ceaseless becoming within the core of everything.