The Quiet Between Signals

screen light on my face—
still, the ramen steam feels more
like being alive

—

I use social media the way you might sip from a too-sweet drink—
occasionally, cautiously,
wondering if you’re thirsty or just bored.

It’s there, in my pocket.
The little rectangle that hums with updates,
with curated lives,
with thoughts trimmed down to the size of attention spans.

And sometimes I scroll.
Not because I want to,
but because it’s late,
and the silence starts to echo too loudly through the room.
So I let someone else’s life fill the space.
A stranger’s vacation.
A recipe I won’t make.
A quote about peace,
surrounded by chaos.

But more and more, I find myself setting it down.

—

The Things That Don’t Fit in Frames

A bowl of soup on a cold morning.
The texture of worn-out denim against your skin.
The sound of someone breathing next to you,
not saying anything,
but saying everything.

These things don’t translate well.
You can post the picture,
but the smell doesn’t come with it.
The warmth.
The uneven chop of green onion floating in the broth.
The way someone laughed,
just once,
while you were chewing.

You can’t upload that.
And maybe that’s why it matters.

—

The Reluctance Is a Kind of Love

It’s not that I hate social media.
It has its uses.
It’s a way to touch,
when physical distance stretches too far.
It’s a way to say “I’m still here,”
without needing to speak.

But I don’t want to live there.
Not in the scroll.
Not in the loop of likes and reactions
and the feeling that everyone else is moving forward while you sit still.

Because stillness, when you choose it,
is not failure.
It’s a kind of presence.

And presence is what I want more of.
In the way the sun hits the floor at 3 p.m.
In the way a stranger’s voice curls around a word you’ve heard a thousand times,
but suddenly sounds new.
In the mess.
The mundane.
The parts that never get filtered.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unposted Moment

Wabi-sabi teaches us to honor what’s incomplete,
unpolished,
quiet.
It reminds us:

• Not everything needs to be shared to be meaningful.
• What isn’t captured often stays longer.
• Attention is the truest form of intimacy.
• Life is not content. It’s contact.

—

So I use it gently.
A post now and then.
A message when I miss someone.
A story, if it feels more like a whisper than a performance.

But mostly,
I live in the smells.
In the textures.
In the long walks with no music playing.
In the taste of something I’ll never describe as well as I felt it.

And later,
if I remember it clearly enough,
I might write it down—
not to impress you,
but to remind myself
that I was there.

Fully.
Briefly.
Wonderfully
unrecorded.