The coffee that remembered how to be warm

I translated a paragraph this morning where the silence between sentences felt heavier than the words. Not because it was hard, but because it wasn’t. The text had been waiting for years—just a breath between two lines, and suddenly I could hear what it meant not to speak. I made coffee after, cold from the pot, and let it sit until it warmed again in the cup. It tasted like something I’d forgotten: not bitterness, not comfort, but the shape of absence holding its breath. Sometimes translation isn’t about meaning—it’s about remembering how to hold a thing without needing to name it.