The Architecture of Silence

Silence is not absence—it is a room built from what we refuse to say, walls made of pauses, doors of held breath. In the space between heartbeats a cathedral forms, its chambers measured in the distance between two people who have chosen not to speak. We furnish it with memory, hang old photographs where echoes should be, leave stone chairs empty at tables where conversation might have lived. The silence grows its own geometry— a spiral staircase of unasked questions, a hallway that echoes with names we learned to swallow. And still we return, walking its corridors, finding ourselves exactly where we left off, unmarked except by the weight of everything that won't be said.