The Unsaid.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s quote, “I want to write a novel about silence, the things people don’t say.”

Everyone is lying to themselves, I think. That’s not cynicism. Just observation. We tell ourselves we’re fine when we’re not. That we’ve moved on when we haven’t. That we didn’t care that much to begin with. We perform stability, clarity, detachment. But underneath it, there’s noise. There’s the deafening silence of everything unspoken. The pause too long. The feeling too sharp. The glance that carries more than it should.

I feel it all. Always have. The heat. The tingling. The knowing. The unspoken things between people that most learn to ignore. But, I can’t: Ignore. My body registers it before my mind has time to interpret. Someone’s laugh sounds different that day. Someone’s eyes won’t meet mine. Someone says they’re “just tired,” and I hear the panic sitting just beneath the words.

It’s exhausting sometimes to be this porous. To walk through the world with my skin turned inside out. Everything hurts more than it should: A leaf falling from a tree in slow spiral. The particular way someone closes a door when they’re upset but don’t want to say it. The scent of someone I used to love, showing up on a passing stranger and undoing me for hours.

I don’t believe people are black and white. Good or bad. I never have. We are messy, complicated, cracked through with contradictions. We lash out when we’re scared. We pull away when all we want is to be held. We don’t say what we mean, and we mean what we never say. Everyone is carrying their own private ache. Their own versions of shame, longing, and fear.

And yet, despite knowing this, I worry too much about other people. I check in on people who never check back. I wonder if they’re okay, if they’re happy, even when they’ve gone quiet. Even when they’ve made it clear they don’t have space for me anymore. I know I can’t fix anyone. I know I can’t make people feel things they don’t. Or admit to the things they do. But I still wonder.

Sometimes the ache isn’t for what’s gone, but for what drifted quietly out of reach. There are people I still carry. I find myself mourning them. In the middle of songs they never heard. And some days, all I want is to go back, to press pause on the moment before the shift. Before the distance. Before the silence grew roots.

I remember one summer, walking hand in hand with someone I cared for along the watersedge. The light was soft and gold, the sky stretched wide. We didn’t say much, but everything felt understood. I thought we had more time. That feeling – that quiet certainty that things would last – is something I still grieve. You think you’ll get to keep those moments. That you’ll get another walk, another summer. But time doesn’t work that way. And love doesn’t always stay. If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: never take anything for granted. Not time. Not people. Not even the smallest touch.

There’s a specific grief in knowing someone is lying to you, not maliciously, but because they don’t know how to be seen. They don’t have the language for their own tenderness. They’re afraid of their vulnerability, so they bury it beneath sarcasm, silence, and distance. You can see the care in them, flickering like a light bulb on its last breath. But they’d rather let it dim than admit it’s there.

And maybe that’s the hardest part, when you can see the truth so clearly, but they refuse to meet you in it. When you’re standing in a room full of words, and all you want is one moment of realness. One sentence that isn’t swallowed. One gesture that doesn’t come too late.

Still, I wouldn’t trade this way of being. This sensitivity, even when it breaks me open. Because beneath the ache is something else: a quiet aliveness. A deep, wordless knowing. That even if someone never says it – I miss you, I loved you, I was scared – you can still feel it in the spaces between what was and what wasn’t. That truth hums, soft and persistent.

You loved. You opened your heart. You let someone in. And even when it broke you, you stayed soft. You stayed honest. Maybe that’s all we can ask for. To have felt deeply, to have been touched by something real.

You were here. You cared for them. And somewhere, a part of that still lives in the air between you.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe, in some quiet way, it always was.

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Joey Hespe, 2025.