Silence is never truly silent.

I once believed silence was nothingness, a mere absence of sound. But silence is not empty. It is dense, oppressive, an abyss filled with echoes of everything I tried to escape. It does not vanish when ignored. It lingers, waiting, knowing that eventually, I will have no choice but to surrender to it.

That is why I run from it.

I scroll endlessly, drowning in distractions, not because I seek entertainment but because I fear what lurks in the stillness. I flood my surroundings with noise, voices, and empty conversations—not because I crave company but because silence demands something from me that I am not ready to give: confrontation. It strips away the illusions I have built, dismantles the narratives I have carefully crafted, and forces me to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth—I am both the wounded and the wound, both the betrayed and the betrayer.

Silence is patient. It does not chase. It does not demand. It simply waits, knowing that when the last distraction fades, I will be left alone with nothing but the raw weight of my own existence. And when it comes, it does not arrive as peace; it arrives as reckoning. It does not speak in whispers but in echoes—echoes of the past, of the things I should have done, of the choices I should have made. It forces me to stare into the reflection of who I have become, to see not just the scars left by others but the ones I have inflicted upon myself and upon those who once trusted me.

Time is often mistaken for a healer, but it is not. Time does not erase guilt; it merely buries it under layers of rationalization. My regrets are not scars that have healed; they are wounds that have festered in silence. The betrayals I suffered pale in comparison to the betrayals I have committed—words spoken in anger, love discarded carelessly, hands that reached for me while I turned away. I have been the architect of my own ruin, the executioner of my own peace. And silence knows this. That is why it waits.

And yet, I convince myself I have let go. People say “move on” as though pain is an object one can discard, as if regret is a weight that can be put down. But letting go is not freedom; it is a struggle, a war waged within the mind, where the self becomes both prisoner and executioner. To truly let go, I would have to strip myself of everything I have built to survive. I would have to face the truth that the person I want to be and the person I have become are not the same. And that realization is unbearable.

I walk through life believing I am alone in this. That I am the only one carrying the unbearable weight of a mind that refuses to forget. But I see it in others too. I see it in their restless eyes, in their laughter that doesn’t quite reach their soul, in the way they drown themselves in work, in distractions, in temporary escapes. They, too, are haunted. They, too, are running. They, too, fear that if they stop, even for a moment, silence will consume them whole.

So perhaps silence is not the enemy. Perhaps silence is the only thing that has ever told me the truth. Perhaps, instead of fleeing from it, I should allow it to break me—to dismantle the illusion of who I think I am so that I may finally see who I have become. Because if silence is never truly empty, then perhaps, neither am I. Perhaps my pain, my regrets, my guilt, and my shame are not punishments but mirrors—reflecting back the truth I have tried so desperately to avoid. And maybe, just maybe, it is only in accepting this truth that I can finally be free.