Silence of Your Heart
In the silence of your heart, I stand at the threshold, my hands trembling on the doorknob of every word unspoken,
Afraid to name the ache, afraid to breathe too loud in the darkness we both pretend is safety.
Each night, I wait for some sign–a flicker in your eyes, a tremor in your voice, a gesture that might say
What neither of us can risk, what we both circle like wolves: the cost of loving, the penalty for staying.
Shadows spill across our bedroom floor, whispering stories of what we’ve lost, of all we’ll never claim,
And the price of fear settles over us, thick and cold, a blanket stitched from secrets and shame.
You lie close–body familiar, scent imprinted in my bones–but the distance between us is measured in unshed tears,
A love so fragile we won’t name it, too terrified that speaking aloud will shatter what little remains.
In the stillness, I touch your face and feel you hesitate–every caress a question, every kiss a prayer for mercy,
The silence louder than any argument, the quiet proof that we both know the ending before the story even begins.
Holding your hand is like holding a ghost–your skin is warm but your heart is somewhere I can’t reach,
And the shame of longing, of needing, of not being enough, settles in the crooks of our elbows, the back of your neck.
Pain stitches itself into our rituals: the coffee poured, the forced laughter at dinner,
The way we turn out the lights and press together, hoping that skin can erase what words cannot.
But nothing changes; in the silence, we are lost–adrift in an ocean of “maybe” and “not quite,”
Our love a shadow–never named, always feared, hidden beneath the surface, desperate to survive the night.
Night after night, the hours grow longer, darker, each breath more shallow than the last,
We wear our fear like jewelry, clinking in the stillness, binding us to a history we can’t rewrite.
To love is to risk losing; to stay is to risk forgetting how to love at all,
So we linger at the crossroads, clinging to one another out of habit, out of memory, out of the dread
That solitude will be worse than this ache, that the cold left by your absence would chill me to the bone.
The chain of fear is tight around our throats; our voices thin and brittle, never quite able to say
What we need, what we want, what we might dare if we believed love was something we deserved.
We hide behind touch, behind the comfort of flesh, while inside we both scream–
Each night I watch the clock, counting the seconds between your breaths,
Terrified that I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone,
Terrified that I’ll wake up and you’ll still be here.
The silence of your heart is cold–a tomb for every word left unsaid,
A graveyard for dreams we were too scared to follow,
A love untold, a story old, the pages curling at the corners from neglect.
We are both afraid to lose, but more afraid to find–
That what we’ve called love is only the fear of being alone,
A brittle peace built from old wounds,
A love that fear has left behind.
When the night grows thick with breathless dread,
Fear becomes a chain we polish and polish,
Hoping it will one day look like jewelry,
But the weight never lightens.
In the dark, the world narrows to the space between your shoulder blades and my lips,
A geography of regret–
In love, we find our greatest fear:
That no matter how close we cling,
We’re alone,
Just two bodies orbiting a void.
Still, I hold you through the night,
Grasping at warmth, at hope, at a future I can’t imagine,
Praying that dawn might bring a miracle,
That the silence might finally break.
But morning always comes,
And we are both still here–
Afraid that love will disappear,
Afraid that it never really existed at all.
The silence of your heart is cold,
A love untold, a story old–
We’re afraid to lose, afraid to find,
A love that fear has left behind.