The Silence I Always Knew Would Come
13:47 Apr 21 2025
Times Read: 48
It's been a while since I last wrote like this - not for lack of things to say, but more because I've been carrying them so closely that letting them out felt… unnecessary. Or maybe futile. But today, I find myself drawn back here, fingers hovering over the keys, wondering if putting the thoughts into words will dull their edge or sharpen it.
Change. It always starts so softly, doesn't it?
Like a door that doesn’t quite latch. At first, it seems like nothing - a shift in tone, a missed message, a pause that lingers just a little too long. You tell yourself not to overthink it, that people get busy, that life happens. But somewhere, deep in that quiet place where your intuition lives, you already know. You always did.
What once moved fast - with intensity, with hunger, with meaning - slows. Conversations that once flowed like rivers dry into fractured exchanges or, worse, silence. You scroll back through old messages, not because you want to relive them, but because you're trying to remember when the current changed. When the light dimmed. When you started holding back... not out of fear, but because you realized you were the only one still offering something real.
It’s not the first time. It never is.
There’s always a beginning so vivid, so full of promise. The feeling that maybe this time it’s different. That maybe the connection won’t wither under the weight of time, distance, or distraction. But people are patterns. And I’ve learned that no matter how unique someone may seem at first, eventually the story folds into the same tired shape. I become too much or not enough. Too deep or too quiet. Too thoughtful or too reserved. And slowly, I become an afterthought in a story I was once asked to help write.
I don’t blame anyone. Not really. The truth is, I’ve come to expect it. To brace for the unraveling even while I’m enjoying the weaving. It’s a strange thing to carry hope and dread in the same breath - to lean into something beautiful while already mourning the ending you know will come.
Now, there’s nothing but space.
The kind of silence that doesn't echo, that doesn’t ask or answer... it just exists. Heavy and plain. And it’s in this silence that I am reminded: maybe this is just the shape of things for people like me. Maybe I was made to dwell in the spaces between, where connection is brief and memory becomes the companion that stays.
So here I am, writing again. Not to be heard. Not to fix what’s fading. Just to put the weight down for a little while.
And when I close this journal, I’ll do what I always do. I’ll exhale the ache. I’ll tuck it into the part of me that knows how to keep walking, even when there’s no longer someone walking beside me.
Change came. And it wasn’t surprising.
It never is.
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