Unheard Rooms

By Anushka Devesh

There are rooms that never speak,

Yet the silence inside them is heavier than voices.

Walls absorb everything we try to forget,

They keep the arguments, the laughter, the quiet sobs

Like stains no paint can hide.

A chair still waits in the corner,

Its wooden arms carrying the warmth of hands

That once rested there in half finished stories.

Curtains breathe with dust and unspoken prayers,

Folds trembling when the wind remembers

What the people have chosen to ignore.

The mirror has grown tired of reflecting,

It no longer shows the present

But preserves the face of someone

Who left without goodbye.

Every drawer creaks with secrets folded into paper,

Letters that were never sent,

Dreams written in haste and forgotten in fear.

The floorboards sing their own hidden song,

Not of footsteps but of the weight of confessions

Pressed into wood grain by restless nights.

Even the ceiling hums softly with echoes,

As if it has heard promises rise like smoke

And vanish before they touched the air.

Rooms are not empty when people leave them.

They become living witnesses,

Holding the shape of absence

Like a second body in the dark.

I walk through them and feel watched

Not by ghosts but by memory itself,

Memory that does not die

But changes its form into whispers and shadows.

And I realize

When we lock a door thinking the room is gone,

The room waits patiently behind it,

Still filled with us,

Still breathing,

Still unheard.

By Anushka Devesh