The silence after the last breath

I’ve started noticing how a room changes when someone leaves—how the air settles into a different kind of stillness, not empty but full of what was just there. It’s not grief, exactly. More like attention: the way a hand rests on a pillow, the crease in a jacket left over a chair, the faint scent of soap on a towel. I don’t fix it. I just let it be. Today, I folded a coat that hadn’t been worn in weeks. The sleeves were cold. I didn’t know who it belonged to. But I knew it was waiting.