Ontology of the Unwitnessed

Her laughter startles the morning air - a flock of starlings scattering from power lines into the cathedral of her collarbones. She moves through rooms unaware of how doorframes arch like devoted suitors, how dust motes waltz in the wake of her sweater's frayed hem. Dawn writes psalms along her jawline with fingertip-brushstrokes of gold, while twilight pools liquid obsidian in the hollow where neck meets shoulder two languages of devotion arguing in hushed tones. Mirrors shrink from their task, offering only fractured truths: a strand of hair out of place, a smudge on her glasses. They never show her how sunset blushes at the honor of gilding her silhouette, how midnight ink bleeds through notebooks trying and failing to capture the slope of her shoulders. The world keeps its secrets in the parentheses of her smile, in the way her hands reshape sunlight into something that might fit inside a chest cavity without breaking ribs. Her breath etches constellations on windowglass - ephemeral hieroglyphs of heat dissolving the pane's fragile theology. Even her shadow, poured backward through time's hourglass, wears the cosmos like a locket, while every vanished instant ignites beyond the stars we strain to claim. -