Things The Silence Taught Me

I have lived so long with silence

that I learned its many names—

the silence of an empty room,

the silence after someone leaves,

the silence that settles in the bones

when hope has grown too tired to speak.

For many years,

I have carried my own darkness

like a lantern with no flame,

learning how to walk through nights

that seemed determined

never to end.

I learned to stay awake

when sleep would not come,

to listen to the ceiling breathe,

to count the hours by their weight,

and to hold myself together

without anyone noticing I was breaking,

too tired to care.

No one taught me how to endure.

I became my own teacher,

my own shelter,

my own hand upon the trembling shoulder.

At first, solitude was a wound,

But all wounds heal sometimes very slowly.

Then it became a room.

Then a mirror.

Then, slowly,

a place where I could meet myself

without fear.

I discovered that being alone

is not always the same as being lonely.

Sometimes loneliness is standing among people

and feeling invisible.

Sometimes solitude is sitting in the dark

and finally feeling seen.

I learned that silence can talk—

not in words,

but in truths too deep for language.

It told me who stayed only when I was useful.

It told me what I had survived.

It told me that I was still here.

And now, when the world grows loud,

I do not run from the quiet.

I return to it.

There, I remember

that I am more than what abandoned me,

more than the years no one witnessed,

more than the nights I survived alone.

I am the person

who learned how to remain

when everything inside me

was begging to disappear.

And perhaps that is wisdom—

not knowing how to avoid the darkness,

but learning how to sit beside it

without becoming it.

After spending most my life alone,

I no longer ask the silence

to leave.

I listen.

And sometimes,

beneath all that emptiness,

I hear my own heart—

still beating,

still becoming,

still choosing

to stay.

Forged by the furnace of the Lord.