Exhaled Light

July #012. Silence has weight. That is the discovery this work makes material, not the silence after speech ends, but the silence inside the moment speech arrests itself, the fraction of a second where a word is already leaving the body and is simultaneously swallowed back, and what remains is neither said nor unsaid but something catastrophically between.

I began with a single line from Thomas Nelson Page: a man starting to exclaim something and checking himself, another man flinching before the sentence could resolve. What struck me was not what was almost said but where the almost lives,