lnk Beneath the Silence

The room was quiet—too quiet. Only the soft creak of the old wooden chair and the scratch of the quill against the paper filled the silence, like faint whispers in an empty cathedral.

Aariz sat hunched over the desk, candlelight flickering across his worn face, casting shadows like ghostly fingers dancing on the wall. Before him, a blank parchment awaited its fate, hungry for stories he hadn’t yet dared to tell.

It had been weeks since he'd touched a pen with purpose. The words used to come to him like rivers after rain—rushing, wild, and alive. But lately, they were silent. Or maybe he had just become too loud inside to hear them.

The truth was buried somewhere in a memory—a memory soaked in regret and sealed in silence.

He dipped the quill in the ink again. The black liquid shimmered like a night sky holding forgotten stars. As he placed the nib against the paper, something trembled inside him—not his hand, but his heart.

And then he began to write.

---

"I remember the way she looked at me—like I was made of pages she hadn’t read yet."

"Her name was Aira. She spoke with her eyes and listened with her soul. I told her stories, but she read the silence between my words instead."

"We met under rain-drenched skies, where time paused between thunder and heartbeat. She used to say, ‘Some stories don’t need endings, they just need to be written.’ I never understood what she meant—until the day she left."

His hand moved faster now, as if the ink had found a vein straight to his soul.

"It was my silence that pushed her away. I kept my pain hidden in metaphors, hoping she’d read between the lines. But she needed something more—truth without riddles, presence without poetry."

"I watched her go without a word. I wrote a hundred letters I never sent. Each one soaked in ink and memory. Each one echoing a voice I no longer had the courage to raise."

The candle began to weep wax onto the desk as the night deepened. Outside, the wind whispered against the windowpane, as if urging him on.

He paused, looking at the sheet. It was half-filled, like a heart that still beat but only in echoes. His mind wandered back to that rainy evening—her last smile, her last look back.

And then the second half began to spill.

"Today, I saw a girl on the street with the same green eyes. She wasn’t her, of course, but something inside me stirred—something I thought I buried in ink years ago."

"I wonder if Aira ever reads the sky the way I still do. If she still hums that unfinished tune she made up by the lake. I wonder if she ever reads old books hoping to find herself in someone else’s story, the way I still search for her between my own lines."

"This ink isn’t just ink. It’s everything I couldn’t say. It’s every goodbye I disguised as a metaphor. It’s the voice I lost when she took her silence with her."

The final lines came like the closing of an old wound:

"If this page finds her, may it tell her this—"

"I was never quiet. I was just afraid."

"And every word I wrote was me—screaming your name beneath the silence."

---

Aariz let the quill fall. It clinked softly against the glass inkwell. His eyes were moist—not from sadness alone, but from relief. The silence was no longer heavy. It had finally spoken.

The parchment glowed faintly in the candlelight, no longer empty, no longer waiting. It held truth now. And sometimes, that’s more than enough.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel the need to run from his thoughts. They had found a home.