It Was Your Silence That Gave Me All The Answers

Sometimes I wait for your answer, your words … I have not learned that they never come, or that they may be offered to me in another form, as an absence, as a void that you do not fill with letters and sentences. Your silence eats into itself what I don’t want to hear and what I refuse to hear you say.

It is cowardly to let silence be an answer, but sometimes that’s all we have left. I still haven’t learned to stop expecting things from you, knowing that this void you create is your answer; it’s the message you want to send me

“There are few things as deafening as silence.”

Mario Benedetti

I am not learning to decipher your silence

I fail to interpret the silence you leave after you open the door. I can’t make sense of the words you don’t speak. I need you to use your words to shape all of this thick silence that you create every time you go; every time you are silent

Your silence creates a distance between you and me, an abyss that is impossible to overcome, an inexplicable separation that I don’t deserve, don’t understand, and yet have to accept. But your silence is a path divided into a thousand possibilities, and I can never know which one is that will match your thoughts.

“There, in the center of silence, was not eternity, but the death of time and loneliness so deep that the word itself no longer had any meaning.”

Toni Morrison

What I know about silence

Your silence is not always the same; there are variations that are easy to miss. There is shy silence in which you don’t dare speak to me, but you look me in the eyes and your eyes speak to me.

And then that when you glue your eyes to mine and say nothing. There is an absent silence when I ask you something and you haven’t heard it because you are far from here without wanting to be it. And beyond that, there is complicit silence, the kind that touch your soul with lips that don’t say a single word.

But this silence, the one that separates us now, contains other things, things that we haven’t dared to say yet, and that have created a great space between what we want and what we have. And even though I am not expecting anything anymore, I still have my doubts as to whether I have correctly understood all your types of silence.

My answer to your silence

I can look for thousands of answers in your silence, but I can only answer you in one way: tell me what you think, tell me what is bothering you, I am by your side to help you, to understand you ; if you need a hug I’ll give it to you. If you need a kiss I’ll give you hundreds of them; and if you just want me to listen to you then i will. I’m just asking you to tell me what you want to say.

I can answer you in many different ways, I can give you silence in exchange for yours, but I don’t want to create an even greater distance between us. I can try to shape this silence from you, or I can ignore it and just keep talking to you without getting an answer. I respect your silence and I need you to respect my insecurity, my need to know, to know your thoughts.

The answers that your silence gives me

If you leave without saying anything, your silence whispers to me that you no longer want it. If you don’t reply to my messages, then your silence tells me that you don’t care how I feel or what I think. When I ask for your thoughts and you don’t answer, your silence tells me that there is something you want to hide from me.

Perhaps it is not these answers that you want to give me with your silence; maybe there are others, but I can’t know them if you don’t help me understand what you’re not telling me.

I hardly remember the echo of your words; I don’t hear them anymore. You move before me like a ghost, like someone I don’t recognize, and it is your silence that suggests what you are unable to say with words.

And if you close the door behind you again without saying a word, then close it forever; don’t come back because it will be that moment that I will understand that you were just waiting to say goodbye to me.

“Words are never enough when what you want to say floods the soul.”

Julio Cortazar