Unsettling Stillness

Nothing else.

Feb 04, 2026

He said he’d be back later,
and she waited for the reassurance to arrive.

The message arrived while he was making tea.
He read it.
Nothing else happened.

The kettle reached its usual click
and stopped.
Steam thinned.
The cup waited.

And then,
she was already holding the handle,
noticing the sound of the room behind her,
the way it kept going.
and going.

She stayed there longer than necessary,
long enough to realise
the room didn’t adjust to her pause —
it continued as if it hadn’t noticed

Somewhere else,
he set the cup down and felt the delay
between the message and the meaning of it,
the small gap where reassurance was supposed to live

He wondered, briefly,
whether she was already standing still,
hand on the handle,
listening to the room continue without her.

That thought passed.
He told himself it meant nothing.
The tea cooled anyway.

Back where she was,
the handle remained unturned.
The room kept sounding like a room.
She became aware of becoming aware of that fact.

It wasn’t the waiting that unsettled her.
It was the sense
that the waiting had begun
before she arrived in it.

Later — or earlier —
he would remember this moment
without remembering why.
Just the feeling of something ordinary
having already decided to persist.

The door stayed closed.
The tea went untouched.
The room, the message, the promise
all continued,
exactly as they had been.

As if nothing else,
had ever been required

ㅤㅤ

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