Quiet water,
still and understood.
No storm,
no thunderous clash of waves,
but whispering ripples.
Slow and steady,
hidden under the willow tree.
Letting them fester,
not some quiet act of grace,
but abandonment,
dressed in silence.
When avoidance is the habit,
truth becomes a threat.
Unspoken,
not for lack of words ,
but for lack of courage.
Resentment, a soft dust,
settling into weight.
When the collapse came,
there was no attempt to mend,
only withdrawal.
No ointments and bandages,
but a snip with sharp shears,
a liberating shedding of an old skin.
The pain lies not in the criticism,
but in the silence that preceded it.
There was no unwillingness to grow,
only the absence of a chance.
A truth once lived within me.
That I could carry discomfort,
could take hard truth,
could respect boundaries,
could treat fatigue gently.
The truth is now fragile and
silence makes ghosts.
They walk in my sleep,
leaving fragments of cold declarations,
unveiling mistakes never understood.
The fear of unspoken lists,
quietly compiling somewhere.
A hundred nothings,
that mean everything.