It was never loud between us. Our love never needed proof. Just subtle signs. A gaze that lasted too long. A jacket shrugged off without being asked. How his silence moved toward mine and made room.
We live above the bookstore near the station. The one with crooked shelves and a leaking pipe that drips near the poetry section. On quiet mornings, I wake first. The kettle whispers steam. He is still asleep, half-buried in the blankets, one arm flung across my side of the bed. I write before the city wakes up. One lamp on. My pen moves slowly and carefully across the page because some mornings are fragile.
Some days, we walk to the cafe where we first met. The one where the windows get foggy, and I forgot a pen once. He never mentions that he kept it. Never asks why I replaced it. But he returns it anyway, weeks later, as if it was never gone. The pen, not the moment we shared.
We have a habit of not explaining. He says it once, at the door, without turning around.
We often stroll to Yanping Riverside Park. It is our routine. We never call it that, but we keep coming back to it. On quieter days, we walk under trees that offer more than just shade. Kids dart past on scooters, while we walk slowly. His hand near mine. Sometimes he stops at the railing and looks at the river. I can feel him and the constellation he carries between us.
He rarely talks about work, and when he does, it’s only in fragments. Just enough to remind me that there are things that can’t be put into words. And that’s enough. I don’t have to know everything about him to love him.
I learn to read his silences. The way he checks the locks twice. The way his eyes drift when he’s too tired to pretend. I never think of his silence as distance. It’s a huge part of the whole.
We don’t talk about forever. We just stay.
There are rooftops and rain, the wind carrying jasmine from someone else’s balcony. Matcha soft-serve he buys without asking. The way he looks at me when I hand him a poem. How he holds it like a feather.
We don’t make any promises. But he and I stay.
He once told me that being around me hurt him like a third lung. I don’t say anything. I just trace my thumb over his knuckles and let the silence remain. There are no anniversaries. No statements. Just the ritual of being there.
He catches me when I slip on uneven pavement. His fingers wrap around my arm like the answer to the questions I’ve been too scared to ask. He says, “I guess I’m here to catch you.” I smile and file that sentence in the back of my mind, where the most important things live.
Our life together isn’t always perfect. We fight. We turn our backs in sleep. But we stay. He doesn’t save me. I don’t save him. We just stop pretending we don’t need each other.
And in this world we’ve carved our lives into, the silence isn’t absence—it’s alive, trembling like a living thing.
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