The quiet between the pages is where I live now

I was binding a journal for a woman whose father died last winter. She didn’t want it to look like a memorial—just a place for his voice, in his own hand, to stay. I pressed the leather with my thumb after gluing the spine, not because I needed to, but because the motion felt like holding something that had already been held. The silence in the shop at 7:30 a.m. isn’t empty—it’s full of things people forget to say. I don’t know if I’m preserving memory or just learning how to listen to it.