The Girl Who Collected Silence

Ever since she was a child, Aalia collected silence.

Not coins. Not dolls. Not seashells.

Silence.

She said it started when she was six, the first time she felt the hush of snow falling outside her window. No cars. No voices. Just the soft hush of winter breathing against the glass. “It felt like the world was pausing,” she once told me. “And in that pause, I found peace.”

Most people feared silence. They rushed to fill it—with noise, with screens, with voices speaking just to avoid the weight of their own thoughts. But Aalia? She chased it. Stored it away like treasure. Bits of quiet tucked into corners of her memory.

She grew up in a house that never stopped shouting. Her father yelled through every wall, her mother’s sadness spoke in slamming cupboards. The TV was always on, and when it wasn’t, someone made sure it was replaced by music or arguments.

So she found silence where she could.

In the library corner no one sat in.

In the back of the garden, behind the rose bushes.

In the early mornings before anyone else woke up.

In the spaces between raindrops.

She never explained it like that to others. Not until we were older, sitting on the rooftop of our shared apartment in the city, where the noise never ended but still—somehow—she made room for the quiet.

“I think people underestimate silence,” she said one evening, watching the lights flicker on in the buildings around us. “It’s not empty. It’s full. Full of things we’re too scared to hear.”

I was one of those people.

I filled my world with distractions. Podcasts. Notifications. The endless scroll of news and updates. I didn’t like being alone with my thoughts. But Aalia… she lived for it.

She had this ritual: every night, she would write down one moment of silence she had found that day.

“Today, the moment before a child’s laugh.”

“Today, the pause after the wind stopped.”

“Today, the silence between two strangers holding hands.”

At first, I teased her. “You’re going to run out of things to write.”

She smiled in that way she did when she knew something I didn’t. “You’ll see. Silence isn’t rare. We just stopped noticing it.”

Then, one day, she disappeared.

No note. No call. Just her keys left on the counter and her journal of silence on the windowsill, the last page reading:

“Today, the silence in goodbye.”

I searched everywhere. Called her family. Her friends. No one knew anything. Some thought she’d gone off the grid. Others assumed the worst. But I knew Aalia. She wasn’t someone who left for no reason.

So I went back through her journal.

Page by page.

Silence by silence.

And in those entries, I started to hear her voice again. Not the loud version I was used to, but the one that whispered between words. The one that lived in the moments she collected.

I followed her silence.

Literally.

I went to the library she loved. The coffee shop where she always sat near the window. The quiet trail behind the art museum. Every place, I sat in silence, hoping maybe she'd been there. Maybe she’d left part of herself in the hush.

And something happened.

The world started to slow down.

I stopped checking my phone so much. I started waking up early to listen to the dawn. I began writing down my own silences—awkward at first, then easier.

“Today, the silence of a stranger’s smile.”

“Today, the quiet of a sunrise no one else saw.”

“Today, the pause between missing her and remembering her.”

I never found Aalia.

But I began to understand her.

Maybe she didn’t leave to escape.

Maybe she left to fully live.

To go somewhere where silence wasn’t rare.

Maybe she became part of the stillness she loved so much.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this:

She changed me.

Now, I collect silence too.

Not just for her, but for me.

Because I’ve learned that silence isn’t the absence of sound.

It’s the presence of something deeper.

A kind of listening. A kind of truth.

And in a world that’s always shouting,

Sometimes the quietest things speak the loudest.