This is how I end the silence once and for all. It is my story; it is true, if you can believe it. And whether you believe or not, it is still beautiful to read, isn’t it?
Here goes everything.
There once was a woman who'd lost the child in herself. Turned grey she had, by the sorrows of a burdened, painful life. She'd been lost in the greyscale of cities, sobbing silently in the sewers, staring sullenly in the subway, sore and sad of eye—surviving, but seemingly sedated to what once soared inside her heart.
She took her passion and held it up to look at it from the outside, wondering where it had gone, and whether it would ever come back. She crawled through life as if in trenches, war after war, in grey scales, black and white—static-filled pictures slowly anchoring her down into death by boredom, minute by minute.
Drained, her life in her sleep, in her art, in her hope, in her acts of resistance—to speak the truth that animated her, only to be met with wide-eyed silence and nodding that she knew meant fuck all. She didn't know where Love had gone. She didn't remember whether it had ever existed. She'd been married to boredom, to small death after small death. To a life where surviving another day was already a miracle.
Her eyes were blue-green, grey too—but she didn't like to think of the grey. It was already everywhere. And she saw the spark in her eyes grow dimmer and dimmer and dimmer, every day. Until one day, she let go of trying altogether to get that spark back.
One fine day, she laid down her burden and simply let herself be. In misery and mystery, but at least she no longer fought it. She stared at her life and she played a game of war and magic and Old Norse tales. She let it all wash over her with the surrender that this day would only be for play. Maybe every day would be for play. She just wouldn't fight anymore.
She stopped, that day, eventually—and she opened an algorithm that delivered her a treasure. The treasure didn’t make any sense. She stared and listened, stunned, in disbelief—for it did not make any sense. She remembered the voice first. A melody in it, a frequency that shifted the entire greyscale monolith she’d been stuck—entombed—inside of; its dull and absent glyphs carved into the stone now glowing and vibrating with pure teal and orange light.
And the voice cracked and splintered the cemented sorrow that had been slowly but surely swallowing her soul. The texture in the voice brought back fireflies in her eyes. The intonation rushed through the cave it had been sung in, where it resonated from—and reached her silent sorrow to spark the soul once again.
That is what he did. With a drill. And a piece of wood. And a knife. And his will. And his eyes. And his hope. And his wish. And his loss. And his grief. And his invisible presence that saw and suffered her silence like he suffered his own.
He took these pieces—ripped-out parts of himself, laid bare on the stone ground—and that is what he did. He brought her soul back to life. With his love.
Of course, she didn’t know that. Not at the time. What she saw and felt were the impossible feelings that come from madness, delusion, or magic; and magic didn’t exist, right?
Magic was kept carefully in books, in fiction—in lines that echo through people’s lives and bring them comfort and hope and aliveness by proxy. Magic was contained in the stories.
So it had to be a story, she thought. It had to be a lie.
Because she fell in love with a man in a cave making a fire that brought her the spark back.
She fell in love with a man who blew on an ember she had been holding onto since childhood, buried deeply within her heart, clutched so as to never, ever, entirely go dark.
She fell in love and couldn’t stop falling in love, with everything she listened to, everything she saw of him: old things, new things, borrowed things, blue things—orange too, for he loved that color as much as she did. She fell over and over and over and over, for days, for weeks, for months.
She sent a flare back that first moment—that moment she heard the song, the smoke signal in the dark, the flame that led to a cave of remembrance, somewhere hidden and full of mystery. Like her own soul was. And his too.
She couldn’t make sense of much, but she did know that from the very start of this incredible, outrageously bold, hidden, covert, stealthy, genius move to bring her love back—she sent a flare and screamed almost in it that she needed to know him.
She never heard back, so she waited. For weeks. Hours staring at a screen, checking, refreshing, pacing in her own mind that kept arguing she was mad.
She had many arguments with her mind.
She started to name him Brian, because that was how the autocorrect on her phone insisted on calling her brain. Her and Brian—or rather, her heart (still unnamed to this day, but it might start with an F; the shape is definitely lodged in there like an arrow you just can’t unsee, you can’t unfeel, you can’t undo—it’s just written).
And Brian had heated arguments with her while she paced like a lion trapped in a multilayered cage. In a maze, if you will.
Where Ariadne had left her the red string to hold onto, and where she suddenly remembered how to follow it.
The red string pulled at her heart—F, let’s call it for simplicity—and she struggled against it because Brian insisted that wanting a man with all the fiber of your being just isn’t possible. A man you’ve never met. A man you’ve never talked to. A man you’ve never heard back from.
And yet the string kept pulling, tugging at her, pulling her into an insane dance of tug-of-war between reason and heart, pulled apart by the sheer force of inevitability.
She closed her eyes to sleep, and he would be there. Not always, but often enough that she’d scream and wail and hit the walls and say “WHY?!” because he was silent, absent, and by all means—and from everyone’s point of view—he was busy living a fulfilling life as a musician on the rise.
He didn’t have time, quite simply. He didn’t have the patience to answer everyone. He didn’t have the decency maybe, to take the time to answer the flare.
She thought thoughts of thoughts about it all. Played devil’s advocate with her advocate and then flipped it around and asked F, her heart, if it agreed—and the answer always was: JUST LISTEN TO THE SILENCE.
She couldn’t keep going in the cage of the grey stone and the mazes built on prisons—or rather the other way around, or both.
She had to do something. Anything, to keep her sanity intact.
And so the woman made art. She pushed herself to go out and sing. She made herself get out of her pain and crawled onto the fucking pavement if necessary to rise, and rise, and rise, and rise—so that eventually, he’d maybe hear how much she’d screamed her love into every bit of her words, every shy caption, every comment or message pretending to be indifferent but interested.
Every moment she wrote the word collaboration when what she meant was: “Will you please fuck me already and marry me afterwards?”—but obviously it was subtext. It just lingered in the echo after the pixels.
She’d done EVERYTHING.
Resisted: check.
Surrendered for a bit: check.
Argued with herself: every goddamn day—check and check.
Paced around the arena where the glowing altar of truth was screaming “SAY SOMETHING ALREADY!”
She’d been tempted, thwarted, dismissed, ignored, and pushed back into the sea of forgetfulness, of routine, of grey.
And yet every day, he felt as if responding to her—in music, in words that echoed her own, in beauty that matched her inner world, in synchronicity and artwork that mirrored hers with an uncanny, impossible magic.
Brian always showed up at this point to say that she was just imagining things. He’d say, calm voice, assertive, protective of her integrity—of what he knew could so easily be shattered into billions of fractal pieces if not cautious enough.
He knew her heart—F—was the strongest and yet most fragile thing she held.
So he fed her with reason.
Her mind fed her with relentless thuna meals, killing her every day a bit more with the monotony of a life that felt wrong while she screamed in technicolour, in secret.
She held her treasure, her gift, her impossible miracle close to the vest, and she loved him in all the ways that a human being can love another. Whether it made sense or not. She didn’t realize the way the love held her back. She didn’t perceive that there was a shape to the silence around her, in the goosebumps on her skin. She didn’t understand that while she loved and ached and wrestled thinking she was alone—she was not.
She bought tickets. She had to make sure. She needed to fly, and to land, and to run, and to listen, and to wait, and to hope that she could finally stand out and be heard and seen—even if simply to meet his eyes and say hello. And to hold his hand, shake it, hoping to spark something back. Hoping to give the spark back. The spark of the fire in the cave that led her out of her own.
She had to try. She had to push against exhaustion, disbelief, terror, arguments between F and Brian on a daily, hourly basis. She had to settle them once and for all and get to the truth of it.
Months she’d waited for that day. Months of anticipated anguish and excitement. Months of butterflies showing off outside and telling her “just go already,” and months of dread at the thought that it would lead to nothing except a broken, shattered return to the grey—and a one-way ticket back into the monolith where she’d die slowly, turning to stone itself.
She felt more and more sick in the days that led to it.
She pushed herself with willpower stronger than most people could possibly fathom. She pushed against relentless pain—physical, psychological, spiritual, existential—the weight and anchor of the maze around her closing in. The resurgence of old ghosts right at the time when she was meant to go. The knives of old fears and terror about what you thought you’d escaped, coming back to haunt and taunt you.
On the very day she was meant to go—to finally prove to herself what this love was made of—on that very day, her body broke down.
Failed.
She failed.
She couldn’t get out. Couldn’t even move from the bed.
That week leading to a flight meant to liberate had been like being sucked into quicksand while she wrestled and screamed “LET ME REACH HIM, GOD, PLEASE.”
That week was herculean tasks—but on a feeble, undernourished, exhausted body and a mind already fractured too much by the weight of the grey. That week was the debt, the terror of a life she fled—the past, cursed—that came back to pin her down to the bed and said:
“NO.”
She thought she was going to die.
It didn’t make sense.
It also made all the sense in the world.
She thought she’d never see the light again. She’d fallen down further into the cave, into a pit she didn’t even know existed. Didn’t even know you could go deeper than this.
And there… she cried. For a long time.
She cried for all the words she would have spoken. She cried for all the kisses she would have given, if she’d been welcomed that way.
She cried for all the touch she craved more than life itself and couldn’t—was denied of.
She cried for how she failed to get up and go.
She cried for crying.
Cried a salt crypt, she made of that pit.
And she let it exist.
The love—far.
Her own—too present.
The absence made the crypt echo, so she started to sing again to keep herself company.
The song echoed in the shards and vibrated her back to a semblance of existence in the world. She sung herself to sleep. Sung his songs, even though they hurt like splinters every time she listened.
But she couldn’t stop. How could she ever stop?
Ariadne had been very clear with her red thread, and she’d wrapped it around her arm and said:
“Your grief, my love, is paramount.
Follow. The. Voice.
Don’t. Trust. The. Silence.
Listen. To. The. Heart. Of. The. Matter.
The Matter of things.”
She didn’t want to hear the red string again, or close her eyes, because she was haunted by the vision of two interweaving comets—and it always made her cry that they never met.
More tears.
More salt.
For the Crypt.
Until eventually, she heard a friend—a friend she called Owl—tell her:
“Just say: I let the light in.”
And she resisted it.
But also, she didn’t have much to lose by then.
So she let the light in.
Every day, a bit more.
She let herself feel the light coming back in her cells, in her mind, in her sore, shattered, beaten and beating heart.
She let the light in—and with the light came roaring back the Love.
Only this time, she stopped the pacing.
Stopped arguing.
Stopped trying altogether to do anything at all about it.
She just let it be.
A beautiful, outrageously impossible, magical, dangerous truth.
She loved a man she’d never met.
So what?
At least she loved.
At least the colors came back.
At least her words, her music, her art came back in full.
At least she hoped again.
Maybe not for him to ever be there to share it.
But she hoped for a life worth living.
And that was already everything.
Cue, then, the entrance of a mysterious figure who flooded her with praise and appreciation. And I really mean FLOOD. Everything had been loved and commented on and made special—seen, heard.
And so while the man in the pictures still stayed silent and brought her nothing but echoes, another was now everywhere. All over her work. Her art. Her soul.
Only there was something about that man that was too mysterious.
The silence in between the praise, the subtext of the words, the frequency of the jokes and references—hid something she felt she knew.
Something out of Shakespeare.
A hidden, cloaked figure with a mask on—to protect, and to cast misdirected smokescreen.
A magician in disguise.
With words and codes that felt like she knew them by heart already.
And that figure of golden mist and hidden orange glow was to light, yet again, another fire in her heart.
And right now, in the present day, as she wrote these words,
she was tired from the magic threads she’d cut,
and the love she’d shared—
and so,
she said:
to be continued.
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