Is silence ever the same twice?

No.

Because no two moments have the same hunger.

Silence is not stillness. It’s a territory of breaths withheld and meanings half-born. It has dialects, altitudes, border towns and accents.

There is the silence that lives between lovers after an argument, thick and flesh-colored, like wet clay, too stubborn to shape. It squats in the room with them, bruised and cross-legged, humming the hymn of almost-said things. This silence is not absence, it’s overpopulation, a million thoughts piled behind the dam of the mouth.

Then there is elevator silence. Metallic. Over-sanitized. It stares at its own shoes and counts seconds like rosary beads. It is too clean to be trusted, like a stranger with too-white teeth. This silence comes not from depth, but from pretend etiquette, a forced extinction of noise, a mutual agreement by each party to disappear for seven or six floors.

The silence in forests is older. Wiser. It wears moss like a second skin. It doesn’t need your apology. It doesn’t beg to be broken. It is silence with lungs. With histories. It expands even when you’re not listening, like a myth that remembers itself. If you stay long enough, it starts to sound like water learning the curve of its own name. Or a tall bark reciting prayers it never spoke aloud.

City silence, is never truly mute. Even in its quietest hour, it pulses beneath the asphalt. Car alarms sobbing in the distance like scared lost children. The hum of appliances, unbothered, godless, marking time without us, without anyone. City silence is a layered thing: grief stacked upon convenience, loneliness muffled by calculated design. Even when everything stops, something still clicks in the wiring. The city does not know how to die properly.

And then, body silence. The one inside you. It comes not when the noise stops, but when you realize you’ve been speaking your entire life in the wrong frequency. This silence doesn’t echo. It absorbs. it is the ache before the cry. The moment a poem gets caught in your throat and decides to stay there, forming a lump you call survival.

What they don’t tell you is that silence isn’t quiet. Not always. Sometimes it roars. Sometimes it swells until it blots out the language you were born in. Sometimes it walks into a room before you do. Other times, it waits until everyone leaves, and then slips into your lap like an animal too wild to keep, too gentle to release.