What the Silence Knows
There are depths in a human being
that language was never built to enter.
Places without windows,
where thought becomes too small
and feeling has no name.
Sometimes I wonder
whether the soul remembers things
the mind has never lived.
Whether somewhere beneath consciousness
there is an ancient river
carrying fragments of every life
we have ever been,
every hand we held,
every sky we stood beneath,
every goodbye we never understood.
Perhaps that is why
certain moments feel older than us.
A song can open a door
you did not know existed.
A stranger’s eyes
can make you feel
as though you have been remembered.
The smell of rain
can return you to a childhood
you thought had disappeared.
And suddenly,
for no reason you can explain,
you are standing in the middle of yourself
feeling the enormous mystery
of having been alive at all.
What is a life, really?
Is it the sum of the things we remember?
Or the invisible weight
of everything that happened
inside us
while nobody was watching?
How many versions of ourselves
have already died
without receiving a funeral?
The child who believed
the world was simple.
The young man who thought
certainty was strength.
The person who once believed
that becoming older
would eventually make everything clear.
Where do those people go?
Do they disappear?
Or do they remain somewhere inside us,
quietly watching
as we become strangers
to the things we once swore
we would never become?
Perhaps becoming human
is not becoming someone.
Maybe it is losing,
again and again,
the person you thought you were
until something quieter remains.
Something without performance.
Something that does not need
to be witnessed to be real.
I have begun to think
that the deepest parts of us
are not loud.
They do not announce themselves.
They arrive as stillness.
As the sudden awareness
that your heartbeat
has been carrying you
through thousands of ordinary moments
you never thanked it for.
As the realisation
that every person you pass
is carrying an entire universe
behind a face
you will probably never understand.
Every stranger is a locked room.
Every old photograph
is evidence of a world
that no longer exists.
Every sunrise
is the universe beginning again
without asking whether
we are ready.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful cruelty
of being alive:
Nothing waits for us.
The rivers keep moving.
Children become old.
Buildings remember footsteps
that no longer return.
Stars burn for ages
without knowing
who is looking.
And still,
we love.
We laugh.
We make promises.
We plant trees
whose shade we may never sit beneath.
We wake up tomorrow
and call it ordinary.
Perhaps courage
is not the absence of fear.
Perhaps it is this:
To remain tender
in a world that gives us
a thousand reasons
to become hard.
To keep wonder
after understanding fails.
To keep giving meaning
to a life
that refuses to explain itself.
To look at the immensity of existence
and still find a reason
to make breakfast,
to call someone,
to write a sentence,
to step outside,
to breathe,
to remain.
Maybe that is all we are ever doing,
standing briefly
beneath an infinite sky,
trying to make peace
with the impossible fact
that we are here.
That we were here.
That one day
we will not be.
And somehow,
for this one impossible moment,
we are.
