Filling the Gaps

David was 51 when silence grew louder.  

When pauses stretched like bridges too far.  

His wife didn’t rush, she rescued —  

grabbed falling words before they disappeared.  

Eleven years of corner offices, conference calls,  

a name synonymous with sharp precision,  

now dulled, as if the edges of him  

were wrapped in something slow and sinking.  

Sleep felt like a forgery, a counterfeit promise.  

Seven hours, eight, nine — all the same.  

Morning arrived heavy as wet autumn leaves,  

his body a clock no longer keeping time.  

Even his afternoons betrayed him, collapsing early:  

first at three, then at one, slipping southward.  

He stopped lifting weights, cancelled gym memberships,  

because even lifting himself felt too much.  

Doctors listened, nodded, prescribed emptiness in bottles.  

Protocols cracked like hollow eggshells. He wondered  

if forgetting small words was forgetting himself —  

if silence would someday stretch too wide to cross.