These Are the Consequences of Sleeping With the Silence
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep with it. The silence had crept in slowly, like fog curling under a doorframe. It wasn’t seductive at first—just convenient. Easier than confrontation, easier than truth. It didn’t ask questions. It didn’t flinch. It didn’t cry when she turned away.
But silence, when slept with long enough, becomes a kind of lover. It learns your rhythms. It memorizes your breath. It wraps itself around your ankles and whispers, “Stay.”
At first, it felt like peace. No arguments. No expectations. No need to explain the ache in her chest when the world felt too loud. She could sit in a room and let the silence hold her, stroke her hair, tell her she was fine. She believed it.
But silence is not neutral. It’s a mirror with no glass. It reflects nothing, and in doing so, it erases everything.
The consequences came slowly. She stopped calling her sister. She stopped writing in her journal. She stopped asking questions that didn’t have easy answers.
She began to curate her life like a museum exhibit—beautiful, distant, untouchable. People admired her restraint. They called her “graceful,” “composed,” “elegant.” No one asked what she had buried beneath the marble floors.
Sleeping with silence meant forgetting how to scream. It meant watching injustice and swallowing it whole. It meant nodding politely when someone said something cruel, because silence had taught her that reaction was weakness.
It meant losing the language of grief. Of joy. Of rage.
She became fluent in avoidance. She could dodge a question like a matador. She could smile through a funeral. She could host a dinner party with a broken heart and no one would notice.
But silence is greedy. It doesn’t just want your voice. It wants your memory. It wants your rituals. It wants your ability to name what hurts.
One day, she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the woman staring back. Not because she had changed, but because she had stopped narrating her own life. She had outsourced her story to silence, and silence had edited out the messy parts.
The consequences of sleeping with silence are not loud. They are subtle. They are cumulative. They are the missed calls, the unsent letters, the unspoken apologies.
They are the moments when someone says, “I didn’t know you felt that way,” and she realizes she never gave them the chance.
They are the dreams that dissolve before morning, because silence doesn’t dream—it waits.
She tried to break up with it once. She lit candles. She played music. She invited noise into her home like an old friend.
But silence is patient. It sat in the corner, watching. It knew she would come back.
And she did. Because silence doesn’t judge. It doesn’t betray. It doesn’t leave.
But it also doesn’t heal. It doesn’t hold you when you cry. It doesn’t say, “I’m proud of you.” It doesn’t laugh at your jokes or challenge your assumptions.
It just stays. And staying, sometimes, feels like love.
But love is not the absence of sound. Love is messy. Love is loud. Love is the clatter of dishes, the slam of doors, the awkward pauses, the vulnerable confessions.
Love is the risk of being misunderstood. Silence guarantees you won’t be. Because it guarantees you won’t be known.
So she began to whisper. Just a little. To herself. To the plants. To the wind.
She whispered her name. She whispered her story. She whispered her truth.
And silence listened. But this time, it didn’t respond.
Because she had remembered something silence could never offer: A voice.
