The weight

It isn’t the silence itself that suffocates; it’s what silence leaves behind. It carves out spaces where thoughts have nowhere to go but inward, and you are left alone with them. Alone with yourself. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Being alone with yourself. Not because you can’t stand the quiet, but because in the quiet, everything you’ve been trying to outrun finally catches up.

The doubts come first. Soft, insidious things that don’t announce themselves with grandeur but seep in like water through cracked walls. Why don’t they call? Why don’t they notice? The questions arrive like familiar strangers, and you let them in because you have nothing else to fill the silence with. You know these questions don’t have answers, or at least not answers that you would dare admit aloud.

I have been in rooms so quiet I could hear my heartbeat echoing in my ears, rooms where even the hum of a refrigerator felt like an intrusion. And yet, those rooms were loud compared to the noise in my own head. The whispers of doubt that turn into an endless litany of if onlys. If only I had said something different. If only I had been better, brighter, more deserving. The silence isn’t passive; it’s punitive.

This is where I stop to wonder how people do it, those who seem content in their own company. I envy them, the ones who can spend a Saturday afternoon alone without feeling like the walls are closing in. I tell myself they are better adjusted, that they have unlocked some secret I have yet to discover. But then I think: maybe they feel it too. Maybe they’ve just learned how to ignore the questions, how to live with the silence without letting it consume them.

The truth is, I have tried to answer the questions. Why don’t they call? Maybe they’re busy, or maybe they’ve moved on, or maybe they were never really mine to lose. Why don’t they notice? Maybe I’ve been hiding too well, or maybe I’ve made myself so small that I’ve disappeared. Why can’t I just be happy with my own company? Maybe because my own company is a reminder of everything I wish I wasn’t.

And yet, I know these answers don’t matter. They are placeholders, temporary fixes for a wound that doesn’t heal. The silence will return, as it always does, and with it, the questions. This is the part that breaks me, the endless cycle of doubt and self-recrimination, the way the quiet never truly leaves. It’s always there, waiting, just out of sight.

There are moments when I try to fight it, to fill the silence with music or words or the hum of meaningless distractions. But even then, the questions find their way in, slipping through the cracks like smoke. I think about calling someone, anyone, just to hear a voice that isn’t my own. But then the doubts start again. What if they don’t pick up? What if they do, and I can’t find the words? What if I am only reaching out to fill a void they can’t possibly understand?

I don’t have answers, not for the questions or for the silence that follows. What I have is this: a faint, flickering hope that one day, the quiet won’t feel so heavy. That I will learn to sit with it, to let it exist without letting it define me.

Until then, I will endure it, the way one endures an ache that has no cure. Not with strength, but with the fragile resilience of someone who has no other choice. Because in the end, the silence may not kill me, but it will leave its mark. And maybe, just maybe, that mark will become a part of me that I can learn to live with.