The fork and the knife
came from the same fire.
They were given edges,
and a silence between them.
Metal remembers the first cooling
longer than any heat.
They live apart now.
Only at the table
is their distance given a name.
—
Left hand, right hand.
They knew each other
before one learned the shape of a key,
the other, the weight of a door held open.
One signs the forms. The other, on the table,
is a map of a country no one visits.
You call one dominant.
You forget the ghost-limb,
the echo of a movement never made.
—
Two socks, spun from one thread.
The machine keeps one for its ghost.
The other, in the drawer, is a perfect inverse,
practising emptiness,
holding a shape that has no opposite.
They live apart now,
and the silence is clean, folded.
—
Shoelaces, one cord severed.
They learn a mirrored tension,
a knot of equal and opposite force
that calls itself balance.
It is what keeps you upright.
It is what measures the distance
to the ground, then— ?
—
We drew a fission and called it horizon.
We drew a breath and called it I.
The seed never asked for the schism,
only the soil.
But now they live apart.
Across streets where the rain falls on two roofs,
across time zones where one wakes as the other sleeps,
across the long night of the phone face-down,
a black mirror reflecting nothing.
Across fiber-optic cables now,
carrying the exact weight and speed
of a silence that has outrun speech.
Across the cold math of orbits,
the calculated dark between stars
that pulse in unsynchronized time,
no longer remembering
they were born of the same dust.
—
You say they don't hate each other.
But hate, at least, is a kind of touch—
the sharp, satisfying sound of a thing breaking.
This is quieter.
This is the physics of a vacuum:
a space defined not by what is absent,
but by the specific shape of what was.
The hallway light left on for years,
burning for no one's return.
The two toothbrushes in the cup,
side by side, a promise petrified.
The resonance of a room
shaped by the echo of a specific laugh,
the precise, familiar weight
of a head on a shoulder
that is now only air.
Beyond physics,
or governed by what new one?
Only that—
without sorry or thank you,
under one roof.