The Weight of Quiet (Elain)
I always thought love was supposed to be loud.
Butterflies. Fireworks. Heart-pounding confessions in the rain. Not this—this quiet ache in my chest whenever I looked at him. Not this stillness that wrapped around me like fog, slow and suffocating, when he wasn't there.
Chris had always been there.
Since the first grade, when I sat beside him in a sandpit and asked if he wanted to be my friend. Since the day I showed up at school with a bruise on my arm and told the teachers I fell down the stairs. Since my mom died and I stopped eating, talking, breathing like a normal person. Chris was always there, quietly stitching me back together in the ways he knew how.
So, of course, I didn’t realize I loved him.
Because love, in my mind, didn’t look like safety. It looked like chaos. Like every boy I dated in high school who called me beautiful and then made me feel ugly. Like every relationship I chased because the silence of being alone was worse than the shouting in my head. I didn’t think someone could love someone broken. Especially not someone who had seen me bleed.
Especially not Chris.
I stood in my cramped studio apartment in downtown LA, covered in paint splatters and trying to figure out why I kept painting his face without meaning to. His eyes—green flecked with hazel, always sharp, always watching. His crooked smile. The line of his jaw, the way it tensed when he was focused on fixing some code or getting frustrated at a slow laptop.
He’d been gone for three years.
Well, not gone gone. We talked every day. Called. Texted. Sent memes and playlists and stupid late-night voice notes. But he hadn’t been here, in this space. He left right after prom like the floor under us cracked open and swallowed him whole. No goodbye. No warning. Just... gone.
And then the phone rang two weeks later, and I picked it up, and all he said was, "Hey. I’m in London now."
He never explained why.
And I never asked.
Now, three years later, he was coming back.
Tomorrow.
I told him he could stay with me. I offered, even though the thought of having him in my space—breathing the same air, walking past the bedroom where I used to cry his name into my pillow—made my skin too tight.
But I missed him more than I was afraid of that.
And maybe a small part of me hoped that something would be different this time. That maybe—just maybe—he’d see me as something more than the girl he had to fix.
