Time passed, but the moment didn’t.
The last message I sent was simple. Not dramatic. Not confrontational. Just honest.
I remember keeping my phone close, not because I needed a reply, but because I needed to know where I stood with them. When the typing bubble never appeared, I told myself they were busy. Then I told myself it didn’t matter.
It did.
There was no ending I could point to. Just a quiet absence that slowly became permanent. What unsettled me wasn’t the loss itself. It was the unfinished sentence. It’s a familiar ending. In relationships, in friendships, where nothing is said, yet everything changes.
We’re taught that healing requires answers. That closure is the clean exit from pain. That if someone would just explain themselve, what they meant, why they pulled away, when things changed, we could finally move on from them.
It’s a comforting idea, honestly. Almost cinematic. The final conversation. The explanation that makes everything click. The before and after.
But yeah… we’re all aware that real life doesn’t wrap things up that neatly. Not like the movies. Not even like the books we underline. So we wait. We keep our phones close. We reread the last message, checking the tone again, as if it might change. We imagine a conversation where everything is clarified in one honest exchange.
It’s the emotional equivalent of rewatching the same scene, hoping it will end differently this time. We tell ourselves we’re being patient. Mature. Open.
But what we’re really doing is putting our lives on hold for an explanation that may never come. Silence doesn’t explain. It just waits.
It creates space and leaves us alone to fill it, with guesses, with self-doubt, with stories that loop because there’s no ending to interrupt them. For a while, I waited with it. I called it patience. Giving space. Doing the right thing. But underneath that restraint was a hope I didn’t want to admit that the silence would eventually turn into clarity.
It didn’t. What shifted wasn’t the silence. It was my willingness to keep waiting. I began to notice the cost. How often my mind returned to the same unanswered place. How silence, unchosen, had started to set the tone of my days.
That’s when it became clear: silence isn’t power by default.
Silence becomes power only when it’s chosen freely and consciously. Not as a freeze. Not as a reaction. But as a deliberate pause, to process, to listen inward, to honor what hasn’t settled yet. What I had been doing wasn’t choosing silence. I was postponing myself. So I stopped. I stopped checking. Stopped rehearsing conversations that would never happen. Stopped waiting for silence to become something else.
Not because I finally understood what happened, but because I understood what it was costing me.
In The Obstacle Is the Way, there’s an idea that what blocks us can also free us, if we stop trying to remove it and start responding to it differently. Silence didn’t need to be solved. It needed to be released. Another person’s clarity isn’t yours to command. Neither is their courage to explain themselves.
I am responsible for how long I linger in the silence. For how much meaning I assign to it. Whether I keep my life paused, waiting for answers. I am not responsible for the ending they never gave.
Hollywood gets this right more often than we notice. Some stories don’t end with answers; they end with acceptance. Like Marriage Story, where understanding doesn’t arrive all at once, but life keeps moving anyway. Or Normal People, where connection exists without permanent resolution.
Not every story closes cleanly. And not every ending needs to. Closure, I learned, is rarely a conversation. More often, it’s a decision.
A decision to choose boundaries over explanations. To act with self-respect without a full story. To keep living even when the sentence remains unfinished.
Not everything needs closure. Some things need acceptance. Quietly, imperfectly, and the courage to move forward anyway.
Love,
Kirana
