Cancer

The silence between you and someone you care about is not the absence of words but the presence of something that does not need to be named yet. You have been reading it as a problem to solve, a gap to fill, but some quiet holds more than conversation ever could. This is the kind of pause that happens when two people have said enough to each other that they can sit in the same room without performing connection. The urge to break it, to ask if everything is okay, is often the thing that would actually break what is being held in the space.