The Shape of Sound and Silence

My father’s words never came easy.
They broke apart as they left his mouth,
tumbling, halting--
as if the weight of them
was too much to carry.

Reading, too, was a kind of war.
Letters blurred, rearranged,
refused to settle into sense.
Sentences stretched too long,
meaning slipping through cracks
before it could take hold.

His words fell out like rolling stones,
fighting for form, for meaning,
for a place to land.
Some tumbled smooth,
worn down by years of trying.
Some jagged, catching on the air,
getting stuck before they could roll free.

I learned words in the space between.
Between broken sounds and silence.
Between what was spoken and what was left unsaid.
Between a father who strained against language
and a child pulled from classrooms,
taught to make words behave.

But what if meaning isn’t just in the saying?
What if it lives in the quiet nod,
in the way he showed me how to fix what’s broken,
in the way he kept us safe without needing to explain?

Maybe I was never meant to master language.
Maybe I was meant to bend it,
to break it apart and put it back together,
to find truth in its missing pieces.

Because words never made my father whole.
And yet--
without knowing how,
without knowing why,
they made me.