It’s in the quietest moments—
when the world falls away and the silence deepens—
that they find me.
Not with words,
not with force,
but as a whisper,
a breath,
an echo of something left unsaid,
trailing behind in the spaces I never dared to fill.
There are pieces of me scattered in the gaps between conversations,
in the looks I didn’t hold,
in the truths I swallowed whole,
too fragile to release into the air,
too raw to survive the light.
I thought time would bury them,
but instead,
they linger like shadows—
soft, unyielding.
How strange that the quiet things,
the unspoken things,
carry the heaviest weight.
How strange that the absence of words
can leave such a mark,
etching its shape into everything I do,
everything I become.
I can feel them—
the moments I lost,
the chances I turned away from,
the feelings I kept locked inside,
because I didn’t know if I could hold them.
It’s easier to pretend they don’t matter.
Easier to say I’ve moved on,
that silence is just space,
that forgetting is the same as letting go.
But here they are,
these voices,
quiet but steady,
reminding me that the things I didn’t say
still live inside me.
That what I pushed down
never really left—
it only waited for me to be still enough
to listen.
And in the stillness,
I begin to understand—
these voices are not my burdens,
but my truths.
They are the parts of me I was too afraid to speak,
too afraid to own.
They are my doubts, my hopes, my regrets,
everything I thought I’d left behind,
but never really did.
And maybe, just maybe,
there’s power in hearing them now.
In naming the silence,
in recognizing the pieces of me
that stayed quiet for so long.
Maybe strength is not in the loudness of what we say,
but in the courage to listen
to what we didn’t.
To let the echoes rise,
to hear them fully,
to allow them to shape me
without fear,
without shame.
For in these echoes,
I find the parts of me I once lost.
The pieces that have waited,
patient,
beneath the noise,
for the day I would be ready
to hear them,
to face them,
to let them guide me home.