A string that breaks.

When does a story begin or end?
What does the past say about the present?

On New Years Eve, I listened to my husband explain that he felt a dark hole growing in his heart. He could not describe the emotion he felt attaching itself to that hole. "Perhaps the emotion is the unnamable one," I said, "the one that we don't know. You know? That one our culture cannot feel."
​
We heard about this emotion on a podcast that we listened to on our way to Washington State. The emotion was described as being silent or a groaning. I can only describe it as the physical action of wrinkled time stretched tight. The emotion is like a string pulled so tight that to twang it would cause it to break.

What is that silence between the breaking points: the moment before a string is strummed and the moment it is strummed; the moment before a bomb goes off and the moment it explodes?

"I have been told that I am not welcome because of what is in my thoughts."
"You ask too many questions."
"No one knows the answers to your questions."

I am rejected for these questions. Dismissed because I will no longer say with confidence, "I know." Perhaps silence is always the best answer.

Silence comes with the realization that nothing I say or do will cause "it" to change. Silence is the moment of "not change." The moment change begins and before it ends.

"I have said my piece, and now, I will listen." When I listen, I respond with silence because to defend myself will do no one any good.
"I will understand and choose not to be understood."

My silence is a ticking bomb. Why is my silence a threat?

"You have everything you have ever wanted, and yet you have nothing," I scream this silently. 

"Do you believe in heaven and hell?
It is a yes or no question."

"I don't know is a better answer than I know."

To question certainty is to become a threat. Is this why I feel that I must disappear? I conform to others expectations to be safe. I conform and stay silent. 

Silence is the moment change begins and before it ends. What comes after silence?

 "Perhaps the emotion is the unnamable one," I said, "the one that we don't know. You know? That one our culture cannot feel."

​What happens when the string breaks?