Malcolm Gladwin

The Silence in the Nothing

I did not know it then

how much of my life I spent

in pursuit of people

who stood behind curtains,

who spoke in half-gestures,

who never saw me at all.

And I

I mistook their silence for grace,

their distance for depth,

wasted hours praising shadows,

thinking they were saints.

 

Age crept in like a quiet thief

while I argued with the wind,

burning every bridge behind me

not for revenge,

but for honesty

because I couldn’t keep pretending

the path was paved with purpose

when all I saw were stones

and no clear road ahead.

 

I wandered through philosophies

like a drunk through alleys,

looking for the one window

still lit at 3 a.m.

some voice to say:

you were right to doubt,

you were right to bleed.

But every answer I found

sounded too rehearsed,

too clean,

like the kind of lie

taught in churches and schools

by those who never questioned

the god they worshipped.

 

I used to think there was something

waiting on the other side of pain

a reward, a reckoning,

a soft hand or a white gate

but the more I lived,

the more I saw how many men

broke themselves

waiting for something

that never came.

 

What if this is it?

What if all we ever had

was the breath between two silences,

the taste of wine on a Sunday night,

the brief flicker of touch

before sleep swallows us whole?

 

The world has always belonged

to those who claimed certainty.

They built empires on our questions,

wrote sacred texts from our fear,

used our doubt

as currency

to buy power,

to sell guilt.

 

And we—we folded our hands,

pretended to be holy,

afraid to ask:

what if no one is watching?

what if no one ever was?

 

Still, I don\'t mind now.

Whether the end is fire,

or dust,

or just a deep forgetting,

I find peace in knowing

that my suffering

was not for applause,

that no angel tallied my failures,

no devil stoked the furnace

for my crimes.

 

I live now

not because I believe,

but because I breathe.

I wake not with purpose,

but with hunger

to feel, to see, to ruin, to rise.

 

Let the priests whisper,

let the mystics dream.

I will walk this road barefoot,

bloody if I must,

toward the same silence

that swallows kings and beggars alike.

 

Because in the end,

there is only one truth worth knowing

that none of us knows

and that this

is the only freedom

we were ever given.