“Chronicle of Silence”

The Habit of Waiting

My mother didn’t leave all at once.

She left the way people leave when we don’t know how to stop them:

without enough noise for us to believe it at first.

First came her voice.

It stayed in the house, but each day a little farther away,

as if the air were pushing it into another invisible room.

Then came her laughter,

which stopped appearing in the places where it used to naturally belong.

And in the end, there was silence…

taking its place without asking permission.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

I remember her hands.

Not as something perfect,

but as the only thing that made me feel the world wouldn’t break so easily.

When she touched me, time felt less hostile,

as if for a moment it could hold itself together without falling apart.

And now there is nothing left to hold it.

Time doesn’t heal.

It only erases the edges of what we love

until it starts to feel like a dream—

one we are no longer sure really happened,

or one we made up ourselves

so we wouldn’t lose it completely.

When she left, the house stayed the same…

but it stopped being the same.

The walls didn’t change, but they stopped protecting me.

The objects stayed in their place,

but none of them spoke of her without hurting me.

And I began to learn how to live inside that absence.

At first I cried without understanding why it still hurt so much.

Then I stopped crying,

not because it hurt less…

but because the pain found another way to stay.

It became colder.

Quieter.

More mine.

I started to build inside myself something I didn’t know how to name.

A kind of refuge made of memory,

of what can no longer be recovered.

As if I could keep her presence in a place

where the world could not reach it.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Nothing brings her back.

Only the echo remains.

Sometimes I call her in silence,

not because I expect an answer,

but because saying her name is the only thing that makes me feel

that I haven’t completely lost her yet.

And still, the air does not respond.

Now I understand something I didn’t want to understand:

I didn’t lose her in a single moment…

I have been losing her every day since.

In every empty table. In every silence I didn’t know how to fill.

Now I walk with that inside me,

waiting for someone to open the door again

as if nothing had ever happened.

I know it won’t happen. But I still wait.

Because that is what remains when someone leaves:

not their presence… but the habit of waiting for them.

An empty throne.

Coldness chosen.

Absolute silence.

And in that silence… I still call her.

And still, I move forward,

not because it has stopped hurting,

but because even in the storm

I have learned not to stop.