He teaches you that you can do more with silence than with words. How it will crawl around inside of you, opening up spaces you’d thought filled, some kind of angry worm burrowing into the meat of you, a thing you can’t get out, no matter how hard you try.

He teaches you that you can tell a man all the ways your husband’s depression took him from you before death did, the meals you ate at a table by yourself,  how you slept in an otherwise empty bed, how the silence rising to the rooftops and rafters filled all the rooms until your own house was a thing to be avoided for fear of wound, until even your own house became just a house, no longer something that you could call home, you could tell a man all the ways that you had lived amongst silence and what he can teach you with his is that there are still more.

What he teaches you with his silence is that when he told you that you were important what he meant instead was that it was important for him to fill a need. What he teaches you with his silence is that when he said he put his whole heart into it, the emphasis should’ve been placed on the word his for this didn’t include yours. That was your mistake, thinking that what you needed might have mattered. Thinking that you might have mattered.

What he teaches you with his silence is how again to be left, how again to lose something. But you don’t need to learn this. There was already the brother, the unborn child, the husband.

So instead what he teaches you most with his silence is how to, at last, finally break.

You just break.

This is what he teaches you with his silence.