I cherish the day your heart was first poured into my hands. I return to it often, turning the memory over like a relic, because now I rarely hear of the hurt anymore. The wounds have become tenebrous things, hidden beyond my sight. Our conversations are shorter these days. By the time I arrive, the storm has usually passed, the evidence swept away, and I am left standing in the aftermath wondering what became of the rain.
Yet there is a strange aphorism that seems to govern you: no matter how far someone drifts, no matter how long the silence lingers, they need only pick up the phone.
You have told me as much countless times.
Pick up the phone.
Not explain yourself. Not justify your absence. Not defend your failures. Just pick up the phone.
Sometimes I don’t even have the opportunity to form an excuse before I’m interrupted by that familiar insistence. And then, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, you tell me I don’t even have to speak.
Just listen.
Listen to your loquaciousness as you wander from one absurd story to the next. Listen to hobbies I know little about. Listen to observations that should mean nothing and somehow mean everything. Listen until the suffering loosens its grip around my throat. Listen until the tedium of merely enduring another day becomes something lighter to carry.
I don’t understand you.
Perhaps that is part of your complexity.
The thing I hate most is not your silence, but what I imagine within it. I see you hurt. Tired. Beset by burdens you never name. I see you retreat into yourself with a kind of stubborn negativism toward your own pain, as though acknowledging it would somehow grant it power. There are moments when you seem almost trapped in a stupor, carrying the weight of the world without allowing anyone to shoulder even a fraction of it beside you.
And selfishly, I wish you would let me in.
Not because I wish to solve anything. Not because I believe I possess some secret remedy. I simply wish to witness it. To know what occupies your thoughts when the world grows quiet. To know the shape of your fears, your desiderata, the things you want and need but seldom ask for.
I have accepted that I may never hear everything. I would never force you to speak.
Still, I wish you would sometimes.
You once told me that hearing someone’s voice is enough. That talking is enough. That presence itself is enough.
If it is enough for you, then it is enough for me.
Even so, I remain ambivalently suspended between understanding and confusion. I mirror your habits at times, an emotional echopraxia I never intended to learn. I borrow fragments from your lexicon, repeat your sayings almost like echolalia, carrying pieces of you into conversations where you are absent. Perhaps that is what happens when someone leaves an imprint on your life large enough to be mistaken for permanence.
I remember those months of silence between us.
I expected resentment. I expected anger. Some melodramatic reckoning for disappearing when I could scarcely find myself, let alone anyone else.
Instead, I found indifference.
Strangely, it made me happy.
There was no punishment waiting for me. No accusation. No inventory of my failures. You understood something I had not yet understood myself: that sometimes people vanish not because they wish to leave others, but because they have already abandoned themselves.
Thank you for understanding that.
Even when I cannot understand you.
Perhaps bravery has never been the absence of fear. Perhaps bravery is fear sitting beside you in the dark, and choosing to move forward anyway. You embody that more than you realize. Beneath the inertia that occasionally holds you still, beneath every burden and every hidden sorrow, there remains something blissful about the way you continue.
There are days when I worry your kindness resembles an abdication of your own needs, as though caring for others comes more naturally than caring for yourself. Yet you continue to offer pieces of your heart to those around you without asking for much in return.
I hope this finds you well.
Or at the very least, I hope it finds you smiling.
I cannot return the dozens of letters you’ve given me. I cannot repay every conversation, every reassurance, every moment you have quietly pulled me back toward myself.
But I hope you know this:
Even when I cannot understand you, I cherish you.
And perhaps some mysteries are not meant to be solved, only loved.
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