WORDS WE NEVER SAID

In a world where unspoken truths can weigh heavier than mountains, no one ever warned me about the danger of words left unsaid. I always thought I could handle it—breaking my heart seemed easier than breaking my mind, after all. But it turns out, the mind is a far more dangerous place than the heart. It doesn’t heal quickly, and it doesn’t forget. What happens when you leave words hanging in the air is that they start to fill every empty space, crowding out anything else, leaving only the residue of missed opportunities and what-ifs. My journal sat in front of me now, filled with everything I’d never said. All the words that could have changed something, anything. It was strange, how it felt so much easier to discard an entire journey than it did to let go of a single glance from yesterday. The words I left behind felt heavier than the pages I wrote them on. I didn’t even know why I kept writing anymore—maybe because it was the only place where I could finally speak, even if no one would ever read it. The reality of not saying things, of keeping my feelings buried, left a deeper scar than any conversation I never had. But what could I do? It’s not like the words would ever come, not now. What was left were the possibilities—the ones that never had a chance to come to life. A life where we could have made different choices, said the things we were too scared to say. But the past is a cruel thing to hang onto. It taunts you with the “what could have been” but never gives you any answers. And so, I sat there, sighing as I thought about how this was all I could do—curse the world, blame myself, and wonder if maybe there was something I could have changed. Maybe I could’ve found a way to let him know how I felt. Maybe I could’ve found the courage to stop pretending. But now, I was just left to face the weight of silence, and it felt as heavy as the words I could never speak. I thought I could be fine, that time would wash it all away—just move on, I told myself. But the more I tried, the more I found myself tangled in a web of thoughts that didn’t make sense. The days and nights we spent together were now just memories—snippets of laughter, quiet moments, little glances exchanged in the middle of the chaos, all trapped in the space between the confusion and the comfort of what used to be. I looked back, trying to make sense of it all, but it was like trying to hold water in my hands. The harder I tried, the more it slipped through my fingers. I regard all of us, how we all fall into this trap—how we’re all just people, trying to navigate this world with the hope that someone might catch us, that someone might finally understand what we didn’t say. Maybe we all end up here, stuck in the mess of things we wanted to say, but never did. And at the end of the day, there’s no one to blame but ourselves. We’re the ones who held back, who kept our truths hidden, all for the sake of protection, or pride, or fear. It’s easy to blame the world for the things that go wrong, but in the end, we’re the ones who let it go unspoken. And maybe that’s the hardest part—learning that we were the ones who stood in our own way.