Cancer
They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.
Cormac McCarthy
The quiet that has settled between you and someone you care about is not the absence of something but the presence of something else entirely. You have been reading it as emptiness when it might be the sound of two people deciding, without words, what they are willing to let the other person carry alone. This kind of silence has weight and direction. It moves like water around the sharp edges of what you each know the other needs, and what you each know you cannot provide. The space it creates is not distance but a different kind of attention, one that leaves room for the other person to be exactly as fragile or as strong as they actually are.