Unsaid

Sometimes I wish we did not have to speak to know each other. Maybe there is an archive of the unsaid. Or maybe the unsaid does not exist until it is spoken. It floats in the air, invisible as dust, unless it crosses the path of a sun ray. In some rooms the air is thick with the unsaid. It stifles you. You have to run outside for fresh air. Gasping, you inhale silences.

For a time I avoided speaking unless someone asked me a question. At school I was mainly silent. People said, [ ] does not speak unless spoken to. It was a fact about me. I did not like being described that way. Internally I was not silent. I took words in and I returned them. I became very good at writing essays. Arranging and re-arranging words and sentences, creating structures of sentences and paragraphs. Structures seemed understandable. It almost didn’t matter what was inside them. Words, chosen precisely for their meaning and separated from their meaning. Words, following one another in processions of words. I did this quietly. I did not waste words. I wrote directly.

I’m often unsure what can be said. I stay silent.

There is something I don’t understand about speaking. How does one speak. Yet we speak.

Is there somewhere a storehouse of everything that it is possible to say. I have been creating my own reference library. Sometimes there is a mistake in the reference and it arrives at the wrong time.

There is nothing unsaid between me and my dog. Between me and my dog, everything is unsaid. Dogs are constantly communicating, and they have hundreds of body language signals. My favourite moments are without communication. No messages transmitted, no requests made. Being near each other. Needing nothing from each other except to be nearby. It is not necessary to touch. Sharing space.

Contact, when it happens, can be painful, even if it is desired. Connection is fragile. A thread from here to there and back again. You do not have to look at the thread. The thread does not need to be observed to exist.

I like walking together. Knowing where the other will turn without looking. Following an invisible thread.

We believe in contrasts between silence and speaking, but it is well known that they are not opposites. Some languages have two words for silence. How to hold on to both. Preserve the silences within words. I take my silence and hand it over to you. Later, you return my silence. Holding onto another’s silence changes it. We carry on, transforming each other’s silences.

The things we do not say do not exist anywhere. They have long disappeared from our vocabularies. We have forgotten how to speak. We sit in silence daily, straining to hear the voices from elsewhere, trying to remember the things we have never said. Those things haunt our memories wordlessly. We fall asleep, and our dreams are filled with traces of things that have never been said. It is impossible to catch them. They float away before we have seen them. They melt on our hands. We never wipe away dust and we do not brush the floors. The things we have not said stay under the layers of the debris of the everyday. Our daily silences add to the piles of the unsaid in every corner. Our refusals linger in the atmosphere. The unsaid becomes a language of its own. The less we speak, the deeper we know it.