Unspoken. Unsaid.
People use them like twins.
They are not.
One has no anatomy.
The other is a headless corpse.
That is the difference.
Unspoken is a thought
still looking for language.
A pressure behind the ribs.
A fist.
A funeral before the coffin.
A child knowing something is wrong
long before anyone gives it a name.
Unspoken is innocent.
Unsaid is not.
Unsaid has vocabulary.
Unsaid knows the sentence.
Unsaid has rehearsed it
in the shower,
in the car,
in the courtroom
of the skull
at three in the morning.
Unsaid has punctuation.
It has considered the consequences.
Then it decided to shut the fuck up.
That is not silence.
That is a decision.
We have beautiful names for decisions like that.
Restraint.
Maturity.
Professionalism.
Keeping the peace.
Being the bigger person.
Human beings are astonishing.
We can turn cowardice into etiquette
if we give it a nice enough word.
So the sentence waits.
Not in the mouth.
Somewhere between
the thought
and the tongue,
there is security check.
Every truth arrives with luggage.
What are you carrying?
A confession.
Declare it.
I love you.
Anything else?
I am angry.
Anything else?
I never forgave you.
Anything else?
I was never happy here.
Anything else?
No. Of course not.
We are very good at emptying our pockets
before the truth gets searched.
And that little country
between unspoken and unsaid
is where we do it.
That is where the murder weapon goes.
That is where the apology loses its spine.
That is where love is stripped of its vowels and sent back to the factory.
That is where a person learns the difference between "I can't say it" and "I won't".
The first is a wound.
The second is architecture.
Give it enough years
and the architecture becomes a house.
Give it a family
and it becomes tradition.
Give it a country
and it becomes culture.
Give it generations
and nobody remembers
there was ever anything to say.
That is the frightening part.
The unspoken can become unsaid.
The unsaid can become normal.
Normal can become invisible.
And invisible things are the easiest things to inherit.
Ask any family what happened.
Watch them look at one another.
Nobody knows.
Everybody knows.
There it is.
The oldest language we have.
A room full of people speaking fluently without saying the sentence.
We call this peace.
Sometimes it is a war with good manners.
Sometimes the thing between two people is not distance.
It is a word both of them know
and neither of them is willing to own.
Sometimes it is a name.
Sometimes a truth.
Sometimes a goodbye postponed so long, it becomes a personality.
And sometimes
it is simply
"no".
The smallest word.
The most expensive.
No, I don't love you.
No, you didn't deserve that.
No, I am not okay.
No, I don't forgive you.
No, I don't want to be the person you made me.
No.
Two letters.
A life can fit inside them.
A marriage can die between them.
A child can become an adult
trying to earn permission to say them.
And perhaps that is what lives between the two words.
Not silence.
Not absence.
A border.
On one side, the thing
you have not yet found the courage to name.
On the other, the thing
you named perfectly and buried anyway.
Between them stands a person
holding a sentence in both hands
like a loaded gun, calling it
peace.
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