the truth between words

on the language of what goes unsaid

I’m very big on silence, as you can probably tell from my essay “the intimacy of never talking again.” I return to it often, not just as a theme, but as a truth I’m still learning to live with. It’s a recurring character, sometimes villain, sometimes savior. Sometimes I wrap myself in it like armor. Sometimes it wraps itself around me like fog, and I don’t even notice I’ve gone quiet until someone mentions it.

It shapes my relationships, my longing, my language, my life. It’s not just the absence of noise, it’s the question under everything: What does it mean to speak, if no one is listening for the silence too?

I’m the type of person who’s constantly yapping. Always online. I fill rooms, timelines, chats. I crack jokes. I overshare on purpose. I say too much about certain things. About something. Pop culture. Other people’s drama. My unsolicited opinions. I make noise for a living, in a way. And yet, I rarely say the thing. The real thing. The thing that matters. That’s the part that slips into silence, the pause, the deflection, the I'm-just-tired. When it comes to saying what matters, I disappear.

I think part of it is self-protection. If I stay funny, analytical, or online enough, no one will notice that I haven’t said anything vulnerable in months. That the only people who know how I really feel are the ones I write to, not the ones I write about. Silence, for me, isn’t always passive, it’s curated. It’s the final draft of what I’ve decided I can’t survive saying out loud.

I used to think I came to silence on my own, like it was a personal habit, a defense I built myself. But lately I’ve been thinking about the people around me, of how my father has a silence he pulls over himself like a blanket. I used to think it was cold. Now I understand it’s how he breathes. Maybe mine is too. Maybe I didn’t invent this quiet. Maybe I inherited it, learned it, absorbed it like smoke in a closed room. Silence as language. Silence as legacy.

And I’ve realized: silence isn’t just something I speak. It’s something I read. I used to think reading it was guess‑work, but the older I get the more it feels like fluency. My mother can shut me up with a single look. I can tell my best friend is annoyed by how she glances past me toward the beyond, scanning some imaginary horizon where the conversation might be less irritating. I know my sister is about to cry when she starts absent‑mindedly itching her elbow. I’ve become fluent in all my people’s silences. There’s entire conversations we’ve never said out loud, but still understand.

Sometimes I want someone who really gets my quiet. Someone fluent in the spaces between my words, who knows my quiet is rarely empty, but full — full of thoughts, fears, love, and chaos — all held without needing to fill the space or fix anything. Someone who sees the whole story in what I don’t say, who doesn’t need a single word to understand everything.

Some people don’t know how to ask for what they need unless you already know to give it. So you have to listen not just for what’s said, but for what’s left unsaid. To understand silence as its own kind of language, one that holds more than just absence.