Anatomy

Anatomy of Silence

Silence is a strange thing.

It grows, like ivy creeping up the walls of an abandoned house, filling in the spaces between words until it becomes unbearable.

I've learned that silence has a texture, a thickness that wraps around you, squeezing tighter and tighter until you wonder if it's something you'll ever escape.

It started off small—a single lie here, an omission there, the bite of my tongue when I wanted to scream.

Now, it feels like silence is all I have.

When she died, everyone around me told me to "take time to heal," to "process the loss." 

What they didn't understand was that loss had swallowed me whole, leaving nothing left to process. Her absence echoed in every quiet room, every empty space I occupied.

People tried to fill the silence for me, throwing condolences and pity like cheap confetti, but none of it stuck. I became the silent girl in the back of the room, the one who always seemed to have something just on the tip of her tongue but never let it out.

There are things I can't say, and not because I don't want to, but because if I did, I think I'd shatter completely. I remember one night, about a week after her funeral, I tried to speak to her as if she were still around. I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, the darkness pressing in on me, and I tried to say something—anything—that would bridge the gap between us. 

But all I managed was a single whisper: I miss you. 

The silence that followed was brutal. It was as if the universe itself had heard my plea and chosen to ignore it.

They don't tell you that grief changes how you see yourself. 

After she died, I wasn't just someone who had lost a friend. I was a hollow shell, half a person, walking around like a ghost. And the worst part? I could hear her voice sometimes, clear as day, telling me that I was stronger than this. But every time I tried to move forward, the silence grew thicker, pulling me back.

Maybe that's why I gravitated toward history so much. There's something comforting about reading the stories of people long gone, people whose lives and loves and losses have faded into the dusty pages of textbooks. It's like stepping into another world, one that isn't haunted by my silence but by the echoes of someone else's.

I wonder sometimes if they, too, knew what it felt like to lose someone so completely, to have the weight of words they'd never say pressing down on them.

My therapist says silence can be healing, that it allows you to reflect and process. But silence isn't healing for me. It's like a cage, one I built myself without realizing, brick by brick, until there was no way out. And maybe that's the hardest part of all—knowing that I could speak if I wanted to, but being too afraid of what would happen if I did.

If I broke the silence, if I let out the pain, would it consume me entirely?

I think about the times I almost told someone about that night about him, about how I felt like I was drowning in my own skin. But each time, I swallowed the words. I choked them down until they became nothing more than a memory, buried under layers of silence. 

How do you confess something so heavy when you know that speaking it into existence will make it real? Silence became my refuge because it was the only thing that didn't demand anything from me.

It let me hide, let me pretend that I was okay.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I let myself wonder if she's somewhere on the other side of this silence, waiting for me to break free. But the truth is, I'm not sure I want to. Because breaking the silence means facing the reality of what happened, of what I've become. And I don't know if I'm ready for that.