This is the hour when the refrigerator hums too loudly. When the silence isn't really silence, but a thick blanket of static that presses against your eardrums. The hour where every small regret feels like a living thing, sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing softly.
Maybe they are a workshop.
We spend our lives trying to fill these hours—with scrolling, with noise, with the blue light of a screen held too close to our faces. We treat them like a leak in the roof, something to be patched and ignored. But maybe the empty hours aren't a void. The Empty Hours