Scorpio
One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"And a little later you added:"You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad...""Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"But the little prince made no reply.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The friendship that has gone quiet carries something you both recognize but have never named directly. It lives in the space between what was shared and what was held back, in the conversations that ended just before they arrived somewhere important. You can feel it when you scroll past their name in your contacts, the weight of the call you could make and the reason you do not make it. What makes the silence feel so specific is not the absence of words but the presence of everything that was almost spoken. The quiet holds its own kind of conversation.