There is a moment before endings.
It isn’t silence.
It isn’t stillness.
It’s a kind of listening.
Like the world is leaning in, waiting for a final word.
A word that will decide whether it continues—or becomes something else entirely.
She sits in front of him, cross-legged on a floor that doesn’t remember being built.
The walls around them no longer hold corners. The ceiling fades into dusk. The air smells like memory—clean, sharp, and fragile.
Between them: a single candle.
Its flame splits gently as they breathe, twin tongues of light swaying in rhythm. One flicker for each of them. Until they speak. And the flames fuse again.
They haven’t used the Third Language in days.
Not fully. Not aloud.
They’re afraid now. But not of what it does.
They’re afraid of what it asks.
Because it no longer speaks through them.
It speaks for them.
And it’s writing them out of the world.
A mirror appears in the corner one night. Uninvited.
When she looks into it, she sees herself made of sentences. Her skin: paragraphs. Her eyes: quotation marks. Her breath: an ellipsis, waiting.
She turns to him, trembling.
He sees it too.
Their bodies are being rewritten.
Not into other people.
But into meaning.
They are no longer characters.
They are language.
The next day, a stranger calls her name in the market. Her given name.
She turns—and for a moment, her face disappears.
Just… blank.
No eyes. No mouth.
Just shimmer. Like heat above pavement.
When he touches her shoulder, it returns.
But they both know.
The unraveling has begun.
They go to the place where it all started.
The not-bar. The not-café. The house made of lost things.
It welcomes them like an old ache.
They sit.
They face each other.
And they speak.
Not in fragments.
Not in moans.
Not in whispers or sighs.
They speak the Third Language in its entirety.
Every word. Every memory. Every unsaid truth.
And the world begins to fade.
Not violently.
Tenderly.
Like an author erasing the sentence they loved the most, because it told too much of the truth.
She says a word that tastes like surrender.
He answers with one that tastes like home.
The walls around them blink.
Then dissolve.
The floor becomes sky.
The ceiling becomes a sea.
They are no longer touching—but they are inside one another.
Not sexually. Not physically.
Existentially.
He says:
“If we finish the sentence, we cease to exist.”
She replies:
“Then let the world be unfinished.”
But the language does not allow for partial things.
It demands wholeness.
They feel it pulling
Through their chests.
Through their spines.
Through the scars they never showed each other.
The Third Language is trying to become real.
And to do that, it must consume them.
So they do the only thing that makes sense.
They stop speaking.
They press their foreheads together.
They breathe.
And they let silence carry the rest.
Because silence, too, is a kind of language.
The last one.
The one that doesn’t need a body.
The one that doesn’t need sound.
The one that is always understood.
When people come to the room the next morning, it’s empty.
No candle. No mirror. No scent. No sound.
Just a strange warmth in the walls.
A shimmer on the floor.
And in the center, etched in soft light:
A single mark.
Not a word. Not a letter.
A shape.
The same shape they both drew, weeks ago, in separate notebooks.
The one that meant everything.
No one knows what it means.
But when two strangers stand near it and lock eyes—
They suddenly understand each other.
Even if they speak nothing in common.
And so the language continues.
Not spoken. Not written.
But felt.
In the glance held too long.
In the touch that says stay.
In the sigh before a kiss.
In the ache that lives behind a smile.
They are no longer bodies.
They are possibility.
They are syntax.
They are the pause in the sentence when the heart decides what it wants to say.
They are unwritten.
And still…
speaking.