Silence

There is a kind of silence that isn’t just the absence of sound, but an entity in itself, a presence so heavy, so tactile, it presses against your chest and makes you wonder if this is what drowning feels like. It’s in the gaps between words, the breath you hold before saying something that might unravel everything. I’ve come to understand that silence is less an empty room and more an overstuffed drawer, filled with fragments of things we cannot bear to throw away.

This realization doesn’t come all at once. It comes late, maybe when you’re sitting alone at a table set for two, staring at the seat across from you, waiting for someone who won’t come. It comes in the middle of a conversation where the pauses stretch too long, not out of comfort but hesitation, both of you weighing the cost of what comes next. It’s in the spaces where truth might live, if only we dared to let it out.

I once read that silence can hold more than noise ever could, and I’ve found this to be true. Silence holds memories, of laughter that no longer echoes, of voices you can’t quite recall but know you’d recognize if you heard them again. Silence holds regret, too. The kind that keeps you up at night, when you replay moments that slipped through your fingers, words you didn’t say because they felt too raw, too risky.

But silence is also a cocoon. It’s the place where grief ripens, where it changes shape. Sometimes it hardens into a shell, making you impenetrable, untouchable. Other times it softens, cracks open, lets the light seep in. In silence, I have found a clarity that no amount of talking could give me. The kind of clarity that comes when you’re finally forced to listen, not to others, but to yourself.

I’ve come to see silence as both a sanctuary and a battlefield. It is where we meet our truest selves, unfiltered, unmasked. It is where we confront the questions we spend our days running from. Who are we, when no one is looking? What do we want, when no one is asking? What are we afraid of, when no one is judging?

These are the questions silence demands we answer, and we can’t hide from them forever. At least, I couldn’t.

There’s a silence that descends right before the storm, a charged, electric silence that feels like the world is holding its breath. And then there’s the silence after, the kind that settles over the wreckage, soft and unrelenting. Both are transformative. Both ask us to sit with the aftermath, to rebuild what’s been broken, or to let go of what cannot be saved.

We don’t talk about silence much, which is ironic, really. It is the undercurrent of every conversation, the unspoken weight behind every word. And yet, in its quiet insistence, it shapes us. It teaches us that there is strength in stillness, in waiting, in listening. It teaches us that some of the most profound truths are the ones we carry alone, in the deep, unlit corners of ourselves.

I’ve learned to make peace with silence, though it wasn’t easy. It has taught me that the words left unsaid often speak the loudest. That sometimes, the most important thing we can do is not to fill the void, but to sit with it. To let it stretch and expand, to let it reveal what we’re too afraid to face.

And so I’ve come to see silence not as an absence, but as a presence. It is not nothing. It is everything we’ve tried to ignore. It is everything we’ve tried to forget. And if we’re brave enough to sit with it, to truly listen, it just might be the one thing that sets us free.