The Weight of Unspoken Words
The boy carried the secret like a burning coal. Each day he returned to the chest by the river, taking a few more letters at a time, drying them in the attic, flattening them beneath heavy books. The papers smelled of damp earth and rust, of something buried too long. Yet their words still breathed.
Anna's voice ran through them: light, sharp, questioning, sometimes joyful, sometimes despairing. His father's voice answered: hesitant, careful, often apologetic. Together they formed a dialogue stretched across summers, a hidden world the boy had never imagined.
One night, by candlelight, he read a line that made his breath catch:
If time is a river, then perhaps we can swim in it together, even when we are apart. .....Anna
He stared at the words until the flame guttered low, his chest aching. They were children when they wrote this, but their voices carried the depth of something larger.....something he was only beginning to feel in himself.
At breakfast the next morning, he studied his father across the table. The man's hair, once black, had threaded through with gray. His hands, rough and scarred, shook slightly when he lifted his cup. His face was a mask of endurance, eyes shadowed as though sleep had long abandoned him.
The boy wanted to ask: Do you remember? Do you still hear her? Do you know the river has kept you alive in her words?
But the silence closed in again, thick as always.
Instead, he slid one of the salvaged letters into his pocket, the paper folded and fragile. A piece of proof. He thought maybe one day he would place it before his father, wordless, and wait for the silence to break itself.
The attic became his refuge. He lined the letters in careful stacks, Anna's on one side, his father's on the other. Slowly he traced the arc of their childhood.....their questions, their fears, their fragile hope that the river could hold what they could not say aloud.
Sometimes he whispered the words as though he were speaking them for both of them. Other times he wrote his own replies in the margins, adding a third voice to their conversation.
One night he wrote:
You are not forgotten. Neither of you. The river still speaks. And so will I.
He folded the page and tucked it into the tin with Anna's notes.
But the letters grew heavier the more he read. Some were playful.....scraps about frogs and fireflies, the warmth of summer nights. Yet others trembled with something darker.
He doesn't listen. He never does. I feel like I live in silence all the time. .....Anna
I try to hear you. But I am afraid of the silence too. Afraid I will disappear inside it. .....His father, as a boy.
The boy pressed the papers flat, his hands shaking. It wasn't just that they had spoken to each other.....it was that they had carried the same loneliness he now felt. The same silence.
And suddenly, he understood: the silence in the house wasn't new. It was old. Older than him. It had seeped into the walls long before he was born.
That night, at supper, he almost spoke again. His father's eyes met his briefly, as though some invisible thread tugged between them. The boy's hand tightened on the letter in his pocket.
But the words wouldn't rise. The silence was too strong, too practiced.
So he sat, chewing slowly, tasting nothing. The clock ticked. The house breathed. And the unspoken words grew heavier still.
The letter burned against his leg all evening. After supper, when his father retreated to the shed and the house grew quiet, the boy crept upstairs to the attic. He lit the stub of candle he had hidden there, shielding the flame with his hand. The letters lay in their careful stacks, whispering to him in silence.
He pulled another from the pile.....one of Anna's. The paper was torn at the edge, the ink blotched, but her words shone through:
Do you think silence grows heavier the longer it lasts? Sometimes I feel like it presses on me, like water pressing on the chest. I wonder if one day I won't be able to breathe at all.
The boy shuddered. He had felt it too.....the air thickening, the weight of things unsaid pressing down until his ribs ached. He wanted to call out across the years: I know. I know exactly what you mean.
Instead, he dug for another letter, this one his father's:
I try to answer, but words feel wrong when I write them. They sound weaker on the page. Maybe time will make them stronger. Maybe one day they will be enough.
The boy pressed the paper to his forehead, his throat raw. His father had always been fighting silence. Always. And now he wore it like armor, the boy realized. The years had made the silence harder, heavier, until it no longer looked like struggle.....it looked like indifference.
But it wasn't indifference. It was drowning.
The boy wanted to shout it at him, to wake him: I found you. I know you were once like me. But the words stayed locked inside.
So instead he did the only thing he could.....he wrote.
On a scrap of paper torn from his schoolbook, he scrawled:
I am not afraid of silence anymore. Not if I can hear you in it. Please don't stop speaking, even if it is only here.
He folded the note small and slipped it into the chest by the river the next day, burying it among the old letters. It was foolish, he knew.....his father would never find it. But somehow, it felt right. It felt like feeding the river itself, trusting it to carry words further than he could.
That evening, the boy returned home mud-streaked and breathless. His grandmother caught sight of him and frowned. "What mischief keeps you out so long?"
He froze, clutching the tin under his shirt.
Her gaze softened suddenly, almost unexpectedly. "You look like him," she said. "When he was your age. Always running to that river. Always coming home with mud on his boots and silence on his lips."
The boy's heart leapt. She knew. She had seen.
But before he could ask, she turned away, muttering, "Best leave the past buried, child. It never thanks you for digging it up."
Her footsteps faded down the hall, leaving the boy standing in the dusk with his secret pounding inside him.
That night, he dreamed of the river again. Only this time, it wasn't carrying words downstream.....it was rising, swallowing the banks, pressing against the house itself. The letters floated around him like leaves, pages tearing loose, ink running. And in the flood, he heard a voice, not Anna's, not his own.....his father's voice, young and unbroken:
Don't let it drown us. Please, don't let it drown us.
The boy woke gasping, the sheets tangled around him. The clock downstairs ticked, merciless, steady, as though mocking his fear.
He sat up in the dark, clutching the letters tight. He knew then that keeping them hidden was no longer enough. If silence was drowning them, then perhaps the only way to breathe again was to break it.
And the coal in his chest flared hotter.
The next day, he could barely keep still at school. Words swam before his eyes on the blackboard, numbers blurred in his copybook. His hand ached to reach for the folded letter in his pocket, the one written by his father long ago: Maybe time will make them stronger. Maybe one day they will be enough.
Enough for what? Enough for now?
When the bell rang, he ran.....not to the river this time, but home. Straight to the attic. He laid the letters out in neat rows, his candle flame flickering over them. Anna's looping script. His father's cramped, cautious lines.
For a moment he saw them sitting side by side, knees muddy, dipping their pens into small glass bottles, writing into silence together. And the ache inside him cracked wide open.
He snatched one of the letters.....his father's.....and went downstairs, clutching it so tightly the paper nearly tore. His feet were heavy as he crossed the hallway, as though the silence itself had thickened into fog.
His father was at the table, hunched over a ledger. The boy stood there, heart hammering.
"Papa," he said. His voice cracked like dry wood.
The man looked up, startled.
The boy's hand trembled as he laid the letter down. Not one of his own, not Anna's, but his father's. Written in a younger hand, but still his. Still him.
For a moment, his father only stared. Then his face drained of color. He reached out, slowly, as if afraid the paper might burn. His fingers brushed the ink. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.
"Where," he whispered hoarsely, "did you find this?"
The boy's throat was too tight to answer. He only looked at him, pleading without words.
And in that silence, something broke. The man's shoulders sagged, his hands shook as he held the letter to his chest. His eyes closed, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer than the boy had ever heard it:
"I thought they were gone. All of them. I buried them so deep…"
His words trailed into silence. But it wasn't the same silence as before. It was trembling, alive, full of something trying to surface.
The boy stepped closer. For the first time, he wasn't afraid of the silence. He was listening.
That night, the house felt different. No words were spoken after supper, but the weight had shifted. The boy lay in bed, wide awake, hearing the faint creak of floorboards as his father paced the hall. The letter was still clutched in his hand.
He didn't know what would come next.....whether more would be said, whether the attic's secret would be revealed. But he knew something had begun.
The coal inside him was no longer burning alone. It had caught another spark.