A silent night

The night doesn’t speak. It waits.

It presses in on you, not with sound, but with its absence, a stillness so profound it feels like suffocation. A silent night is not peaceful. It is not the quiet of a world at rest but the quiet of something missing, something that should be here but isn’t. You can feel the weight of it, the way it holds you captive in your own skin, pressing your thoughts inward until they spill out, unbidden and unrelenting.

I’ve spent so many nights like this, sitting in the kind of silence that hums with questions no one is there to answer. Did I say the wrong thing? Did I do the wrong thing? Will I ever find a way to stop feeling like this? The questions don’t care about timing. They come when the world is still, when there’s nothing to distract you, nothing to drown them out.

There was a time when I found solace in the night. I told myself that it was a refuge, a break from the chaos of the day. But now I know better. Night doesn’t bring clarity; it only sharpens the edges of what you’ve been avoiding. In the dark, every regret, every missed opportunity, every broken thing is magnified. The silence makes sure of that.

I remember one particular night, the kind that clings to you long after it’s gone. I sat by the window, staring out at the street below, where the streetlights cast shadows that stretched and curled like ghosts. The air was cold, but I didn’t move to shut the window. It felt fitting somehow, the chill, the emptiness. I thought about picking up the phone, dialing a number I knew by heart but couldn’t bear to use. I thought about what I would say, what I would hear in return.

In the end, I did nothing.

That’s the thing about silent nights. They paralyze you. They make you believe that nothing you say or do will matter, that the silence is too vast, too deep to fill. So you sit there, motionless, as if by staying still you can avoid breaking the fragile equilibrium.

But the silence breaks anyway. Not with sound, but with the weight of realization. That night by the window, I understood something I had been trying not to see: I was alone. Not just in that moment, but in a way that felt infinite, unchangeable. The kind of alone that isn’t cured by company, the kind that sits in your chest like a stone and refuses to budge.

The hours dragged on, and the night grew colder, darker. I stayed by the window, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t know where else to go. The silence pressed against me, wrapping itself around my thoughts, my memories, my regrets. It whispered things I didn’t want to hear, things I couldn’t ignore.

You could have done more.

You could have said more.

You could have been more.

The night doesn’t lie. It doesn’t comfort or console. It simply is. And in its silence, it forces you to confront the truths you spend your days running from.

When dawn finally came, it didn’t feel like a relief. The light was harsh, glaring, as if it, too, was demanding answers I didn’t have. But it was something, a sign that the night, for all its weight, couldn’t last forever.

I wish I could say I learned something from that night, that it changed me in some profound way. But the truth is, I don’t know. All I know is that the silence remains, waiting for the next night, the next moment when the world goes quiet and the questions come back.

And yet, I keep going. Not because I have found peace, but because I haven’t. Because the silent nights may break me, but they also remind me that I am still here, still breathing, still trying. And for now, that has to be enough.