3.8 KiB
The Intimacy of Never Speaking Again
Oct 22, 2025
There is a certain intimacy in never speaking again. Not the soft kind people romanticize in love stories, but a quieter, stranger intimacy. The kind that comes only after being fully seen. Because intimacy isn’t just late night conversations or bodies curled on a couch. It’s the rare moment two people allow themselves to be known without performance. It’s layered, deliberate. It’s to be truly, dangerously known.
People love the idea of “right person, wrong time,” but fate wasn’t the author here. There was no cosmic theft and no tragic inevitability. I made the choice. I ended it. I didn’t give you a say, or a vote, or even the dignity of mutual unraveling. I walked away first. Not because I didn’t care, but because I cared more than I was capable of holding. You were the kind of person life doesn’t hand you twice. Not perfect. Not destined. Just unrepeatable in a way that will follow me for the rest of my life. And that scared me. You took me back once. You pulled the thread of us through the tear I made and laid it, carefully, across the seam. That kind of grace is not the sort of thing you ask for a second time. So this silence is mine to keep. Not because it is merciful, or easy, or even right in any comforting way. But because I closed the door and I do not get to knock. Regret does not entitle me to return. The ending is my work. Carrying it is, too.
The silence that followed became its own intimacy, sharper than touch, heavier than memory. Silence is not forgetting. Silence is remembering without relief. It is choosing not to reopen a wound, not because the feeling is gone, but because it’s still too alive. Silence after intimacy is both a boundary and a burial ground. Some people do not come around twice, and when they do, you do not keep testing the earth where you’ve already buried something sacred.
And so we carry a private universe no one else will ever witness. To speak now would dilute it. Casual contact would cheapen it. Small talk would vandalize what was once sacred. When two people who knew each other that deeply choose not to speak, the silence becomes the final shared secret. It means you will build a life that has nothing to do with me, and I will do the same. One day, someone will ask about you, and I’ll shrug like your name is just another name. They won’t know there was a time my whole world bent around you. They won’t know the cost of what I keep in silence.I won’t call. Not in the bright hours when I feel brave, not in the dark ones when I don’t. I won’t send a message on an anniversary only we would recognize. I won’t reach for an excuse to ask about your job, the small weather of your days, or a holiday greeting. I won’t ask for a meeting under the pretense of returning something that doesn’t matter. The truth is simple. I ended us. And now my part is to keep the ending intact.
This is not penance dressed up as principle. It is acceptance. There is a line I crossed that cannot be uncrossed, and a door that stays closed because I closed it. I can love what we were and still refuse to disturb it. I can grieve without petitioning for relief. I can choose the kind of silence that protects the best of us from the worst of me.
So I will carry you the way a wallflower holds its silence at the edge of the room. I will go on building a life that has nothing to do with you, not because you were small, but because you were singular. And singular things do not survive rehearsal. They belong to their moment, and then to memory.
But I will know. And that knowing will stay, quiet as snowfall, heavy as stone.
We will not speak again. That is our last intimacy. Not closure. Not peace.
Just the echoing truth that
I lost something irreplaceable,
and I was the one who ended it.