The Silent Secrets We Keep

How much is it the non-verbal stuff we keep hidden, the thoughts and feelings we don’t say that make us who we are? Today, we use a second story to explore this idea. This one is fiction.

Chapter One: The Silent Struggle

Emma sat in her favourite nook in the buzzing cafe, wrapped in a blanket of warmth from her takeaway coffee cup. To the patrons that passed her by, she was just another person in the new-age coffee shop, an efficient lawyer who, on the outside, had it all together. Emma wore her pain like any other heartbroken person, but her feelings were not so obvious to the naked eye. Everyone had a facade they hid behind, an emotional cover-up to go about their daily lives.

A few days later back at school she learned that her little brother, Daniel aged nine, had been found drowned. She put the information in a drawer, it was too tender for the rest of the world, too painful to share. Every morning since Emma took off her pyjamas and put on her normal clothes. She cut up cabbages, scrambled eggs and held the family together, a frown becoming a smile, tears disappearing. In the drawing-room of her soul, Emma carried on. She kept her mouth shut, silenced her emotions. That was her secret.

Chapter Two: The Unspoken Love

In a quiet suburb on the other side of town lived Mr Harris, a retired schoolteacher, who spent most of his days in his untidy but thriving garden, immersed in memories of his deceased wife, Margaret. They had a storybook romance: they’d started courting as teenagers and quickly settled into comforting routines at home, proved capable caregivers of two young girls, made an agreeable household, and took turns laughing and tenderly listening to one another’s confessions over meals at a table covered with sturdy, white cloths. Neither easily given to indulgences, they nonetheless formed a remarkable bond over the decades – friends, lovers, and sharing in everything, never departing for more than an hour or two on separate vacations. When she died at 80, he mourned her as if his own life had ended. Yet, there was one thing that Mr Harris never revealed to anyone, even in the very last days of his life: during his final breaths, he felt a moving regret.

Many years before Margaret died, Mr Harris had fallen in love with another woman, a fellow teacher at the school where he worked. The love affair was short-lived, an intense moment of passion in the life of a man who had always been true to his wife. He never told her, preferring to remain silent on the matter. In fact, he buried the secret so deeply that, as he arranged the roses in his garden, he doubted if it had ever been revealed. Maybe it was better to keep it quiet; maybe it was best not to let those muted shadows of unspoken love sit alongside his abiding guilt. Maybe that was why he waited in a growing twilight of life for death.

Chapter Three: The Hidden Ambitions

As he contemplates a move, so to were my own thoughts. Photo by Antonio Molinari/StocksySo there sits Jessica. A mid-level, thirtysomething executive in a large marketing organisation. Jessica is an above-average performer, with long hours and a dedicated work ethic. She is smart and competent, but all of that comes at the expense of what she really wants out of life: to be a writer. Jessica harbours dreams of creating works that move people, stories with depth and importance. But the fear of failure and the judgment of others holds those dreams in check.

Her fiction, therefore, was a secret confessional, written late at night while the world slept. It was the other world that was hers, the world where she didn’t have to be too good. The longer it persisted, the slower the distance between these two selves – the real person and the fictitious one – began to shrink, while the sound of the suppressed words grew ever louder.

Chapter Four: The Quiet Resentment

He lived in a small coastal town, and was a fisherman. His secret was a distant, cold hatred, which he nurtured against the world below. Ben was the captain of a boat. Like his father before him, this had been his lot from the cradle, and it was to this that he was bound. He would have been an artist, like everyone in his family, if only he didn’t hate it. There lay the rub – Ben could no more have given up fishing than any other man in town could have painted.

Ben’s resentment would simmer and show up in irritable, quiet fits and barbs. He wanted to run away. He wanted to escape and pen poems and fiction and to live his passion without the imposition of expectation. But he didn’t know how. He was afraid of hurting my feelings or disappointing me or letting me down. He was immersed in stormy seas and no one seemed there to throw him a safety rope.

Conclusion: The Power of Breaking the Silence

The tales of Emma, Mr Harris, Jessica and Ben remind us how silence can be truly deafening. How the secrets we hide, how our repressed hopes and dreams and emotions influence who we become, and in ways that might be hard to understand. And how one of the most freeing things we can do is to open our mouths.

Emma stopped suffering in silence when she finally laid bare her grief with a support group; Mr Harris wrote the letter of admission he’d long denied his own vulnerability, and found peace; Jessica made the leap; and the leap worked. Ben picked up his brushes again after an encounter with another struggling artist gave him the permission he’d needed. And Poppy discovered that embracing life after falling in love was only the beginning.

Even if our silent secrets keep us together, they’ll also keep us captive, stifled by a fear of change. When we have the courage to face our ‘I am’s’ and say them out loud, to reveal our vulnerabilities, we free ourselves and each other. In the swirling, noisy world, let’s not forget the force of breaking the silence and speaking our keeping secrets.

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We hope you enjoyed our companionship through these voices of locked silence. And thank you so much for your readership. Emma, Mr Harris, Jessica and Ben are true characters, just like you, and we hope that they inspired you to give thought to your own silences.