The café was crowded, but she heard nothing. Not the clatter of cups, not the murmur of voices, not the rain against the window.
Across from her, he sat perfectly still, his hands wrapped around a coffee that had long gone cold. They had been sitting like this for seventeen minutes. She had counted.
"Say something," she finally whispered.
He looked up, and in his eyes, she saw everything they had never said. All the words that had built walls instead of bridges. All the silences that had spoken louder than arguments.
"What's left to say?" he asked.
And that's when she realized: the weight of what we don't say often crushes what we do.
She stood, leaving her untouched tea on the table. As she walked toward the door, she turned back once. He was still there, still silent, still holding that cold cup.
Some conversations end not with words, but with the absence of them.
The Weight of Silence
Sometimes the loudest conversations happen in the spaces between words.