The Silence
The silence received what I was.
Not who I was. What I was. The small dark shape against the white. The silence took it in the way the heat pressed against my soles—without choice, without direction. Just contact.
The figure's hand still hung at its side. The palm that had turned toward me now faced inward, toward the darkness it was made of.
I tried to speak.
Nothing came. Not silence—something more active than silence. A thickness in the throat that wasn't physical. As if the silence had entered me and now occupied the place where words would form.
The figure watched. Not with eyes—I couldn't see eyes. With the whole of itself. The way the landscape listened.
I was being received.
I did not know what was being received. Perhaps I was blank as the sand, and the figure was finding only the same white emptiness it had always faced.
Then something shifted.
Not in the figure. In the air between us. The silence that had filled the space began to move. Not like wind. Like current. Like the vibration that had hummed through my wrist.
The ribbon.
I looked down.
My hand was empty.
The ribbon was gone.
Not dropped. Not buried again. Simply not there. As if it had never been in my hand. As if the cold and the hum had been dreams of touching something that existed only in the moment of touching.
But the current in the air remained.
I looked up.
The figure had not moved. The darkness that made it stood in the same position. The hand still turned inward. But the current flowed toward it. Toward the doorway. Toward the space between the posts where the presence waited.
I was not being pulled. I was being invited.
Not by the figure. By the air itself. The silence that listened had become the silence that called.
I did not decide to step forward. The step happened. My foot met the sand and the sand did not ripple. It received me the way the silence had received me. Without resistance. Without welcome.
Another step. Another.
The doorway did not grow larger. The figure did not grow closer. But the current around me thickened. Warm now instead of cold. The vibration no longer in my wrist but in my chest. In the place where my breath used to be before the silence filled it.
I stood at the threshold.
The darkness inside the frame was not empty. It was full of something I could not see. Something that pressed against the edges of the frame like water behind glass.
The figure's hand lifted again.
This time the palm faced me.
Not empty.
In the centre of the darkness that made the palm, a point of red. Small. Humming.
The ribbon.
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