Silence is never fully empty. It holds the echoes of unspoken words, lingering in the spaces where thoughts remain unsaid. It carries the weight of replayed choices, each one marking a moment in time. Memories remain, refusing to fade. A moment turns to a question, then doubt. The past does not rest; it stirs, reshapes, insists on being known.
The body begs for rest, but the mind resists. The room is still, yet something remains in the air, unspoken and heavy. What remains is not the silence itself, but all that it holds.
The Weight of What Stays: A Poem
By Kerry Ann Wiley
Thoughts spill like dye in water,
spreading, staining,
refusing to settle.
A voice lingers—uninvited, unshaken.
Was it theirs, or was it true?
Words, once spoken, are never undone.
Storms build slow in the mind.
Air thickens, charged with static.
Tiny moments unravel, distort,
until they become something heavier.
Something undeniable.
What if? What now? What was?
The script unchanged,
the endings unwritten.
A breath.
A pause.
A shift in weight.
For years, the choices seemed simple:
Drown the noise. Fill the silence.
Or fight it—push, shove, run.
Either way, the storm remains,
waiting for cracks to slip through.
This is fear.
This is doubt.
This is grief disguised as memory.
The clock glows red, its tick-tock a constant reminder of time’s unyielding march.
And still, the night offers no resolution.
When Memory Becomes a Storm
Silence is rarely empty. It carries what lingers—the unresolved, the unfinished. Moments that refuse to fade remain within it, waiting. The Weight of What Stays explores how memory shifts, reshapes, and resists stillness.
The image of thoughts “spilling like dye in water” captures how memory seeps, staining the present. As time goes by, conversations once forgotten become more defined. No longer fleeting, they become sharp, laden with the weight of years.
Doubt bends the past, reshaping it into something heavier and uncertain. The air thickens, charged with tension. It mirrors the slow buildup of unresolved thoughts and emotions.
Each one compounds the last, until the storm feels as though it is on the verge of breaking. Like a storm that builds gradually, the tension grows. It becomes heavy and thick, until it can no longer be ignored.
Memories, especially those shaped by doubt or grief, don’t strike all at once but build up gradually, like a storm waiting to break. As they gather, they distort the past, making it more difficult to process. The “charged static” in the air represents the discomfort that builds as these memories linger.
This static clouds the mind and disrupts perception. Some thoughts, like grief, persist, leaving their mark on both the mind and the way moments are remembered.
Letting Silence Settle
The natural instinct is to resist—to drown the silence, to push away what lingers. It might also be to escape or confront. Perhaps there’s a third option: listening. Not all thoughts are enemies; some simply seek acknowledgment. What if the past only needs to be seen, not rewritten?
Memory is never static. It shifts, reshapes, and blends into the present. The Weight of What Stays doesn’t ask for resolution, but for recognition: some memories aren’t simply recalled. They are relived, their significance deepening over time.
The mind craves certainty, yet memory provides none. A fleeting thought gives rise to a question, which gradually takes root as doubt. That doubt reshapes the past, leaving it uncertain and ever-shifting.
Did it happen that way? Was it ever as small as it seemed? Some memories fade, while others grow louder—not because they call for certainty, but because they were never given the space to exist.
Perhaps the past is not meant to be rewritten or fought against. Perhaps the past isn’t something to resolve, but something to live alongside. It lingers neither insisting nor fading. Some memories don’t need to be understood, only acknowledged for what they are—fragments of a time that has passed yet still echoes.
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