The distance between two almosts is a thin thing.

It lives in doorways you don’t fully enter.

It acts well in daylight.

At night it gets ideas.

You can hear it sometimes—

like a chair being moved in a room

that no one is officially using.

It isn’t haunted in a dramatic way.

It’s worse.

It’s polite.

It holds conversations that never start properly,

then nods at them like they were successful.

If you walk through it,

you don’t arrive anywhere new.

You just realize you’ve been slightly misaligned

with everything you were about to do.

There are no screams, no grand hall scenes.

Just the faint feeling

that something almost introduced itself to you

and decided not to embarrass either of you.

And somehow,

that’s the part that lingers.