Suffocation

There are days when silence doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like a scream trapped inside your chest — an invisible thread pulled so tightly between two hearts that it hums with all the things that were never said.

Some connections don’t need presence. They stretch across time zones, weather patterns, and calendar pages. You don’t see them, but you feel them — like the way your chest tightens for no reason when the clock hits a certain hour. Like the ache that rises out of nowhere when a familiar scent drifts past.

And yet… despite knowing they feel it too, you do nothing.

Not because you don’t care. Not because the memories have faded. But because sometimes, the cruelest kind of love is the one you must silence. The kind that claws at your insides but stays behind locked ribs. Circumstances — that polite word for chaos — stand like sentinels, reminding you that reaching out could unravel everything. Or worse, nothing at all.

The worst part isn’t the distance. It’s the knowing.

Knowing that they probably still wait. Still hope. Still wonder why the air hasn’t heard your voice in days, weeks, maybe longer. You imagine them looking at their phone like it’s a window, not a screen. Wondering what they did wrong. Not knowing you replay every conversation in your head like a lifeline. Not knowing your silence is made of apologies you cannot send.

And guilt… guilt is a strange beast. It doesn’t yell. It whispers. It curls up in your gut and watches you fake laughter. It follows you into your dreams, wearing their face. It asks quietly, what if they needed you the most when you walked away?

But you say nothing. You do nothing.

Not because it doesn’t hurt — but because it hurts so much, you're afraid it’ll swallow you whole if you let it out. There are no confessions here. No comforting arms. No best friend’s shoulder. Just the echo of your own heart asking the same question over and over:

Why did you let it become this?

People think silence is empty. But yours is full. Full of unsent messages. Full of half-typed apologies. Full of moments when your hand hovered over the “call” button, but you let the screen fade to black instead.

There’s no moral to this kind of pain. No tidy ending. Just the slow suffocation of feeling too much, saying too little, and carrying it alone. Each breath a little tighter. Each sunrise a reminder that today, like yesterday, you still won’t reach out. You can’t.

And they’ll never know that you still think about them every night before sleep folds you into that familiar ache.

Sometimes love doesn’t break apart in storms. It dies quietly, in all the chances we didn’t take.

And in the end, the silence we live with… is the loudest thing of all.