Not Distance. Just Time. Quiet Isn’t Flight.
I used to buy peace by hiding the parts of me I didn’t know how to name.
I would bury my wants
until they disappeared—
for everyone but me.
If I didn’t speak,
I couldn’t stumble out untruths.
And my confusion wouldn’t break us.
My quiet is not a request for distance,
or a ploy to be cold.
My quiet is a need for time.
I need to know myself,
to be honest with you.
Feelings arrive slowly in me,
sometimes they’re a soup.
I think them out first,
and find the words last.
Language is such a crude tool
for something alive.
I stay warm while I’m finding it.
You let the silence be gentle.
Your patience gives me time to return—
it’s noticed. That grace feels like love.
Asleep in my arms
you make room for my thoughts.
Untangling my inner world,
holding my outer world close.
This much I know:
Time is not distance,
and quiet’s not flight.
I can be a mystery to myself,
and still be a partner to you.
I’m not going anywhere.
My thoughts will grasp the feelings—
and my words will catch up.
And from silence to speech
I’ve still got your hand.
Behind the Wires
Window to my 🧠
This card is about something I’ve had to learn slowly.
Not how to never feel frustration, and not how to become perfectly calm, but how to stay close without speaking falsely.
For a long time, I confused peace with disappearance. I wasn’t hiding my emotions so much as failing to understand them quickly enough to speak them honestly. And because I didn’t trust myself to name them well in the moment, silence felt safer than speech.
That part still makes sense to me, even now. I still don’t do my best talking in the first heat of something. I still need time to understand what I’m actually feeling, why it landed the way it did, what belongs to the moment, what belongs to an older wound, what is truly about us, and what is just noise passing through me. I need time not because I want distance, but because I want accuracy. I would rather come back with something true than hand someone I love a rushed explanation that isn’t.
I’ve developed two important philosophical tools over my life: the Fortress and the Eraser.
The Fortress
This was my psyche’s first powerful tool. It was meant to block everyone out. I thought being a vault meant being safe. If people were getting to me, or if I was struggling, I just kept my head down, trundled through, and made sure no one could see inside. It was “I’m fine” lies and a lot of emotional insulation. It was safe, but it was lonely as hell.
The Eraser
This came later. I spent twenty years using spiritual discipline as a way to get away from myself. I thought that if I could “extinguish” my self, I wouldn’t have to risk the rejection that comes with the give-and-take necessary to have close people in your life. I was using a path to enlightenment as a way to escape the discomfort of being a human with needs. I was trying to be “peaceful” by simply not existing. I thought I could buy the relationship’s safety at the cost of my own presence.
These philosophies are still with me today. I wield them with much more wisdom now—and I’m learning stewardship instead of stealth, with a new, third tool:
The Witness
When I go quiet today, it isn’t an act of distance. It’s a refusal to speak before I understand what’s true.
I’ve realized that I don’t always understand my own feelings the moment they hit. They’re a mess of tangled wires in the basement. If I speak while they’re still crossed, I’m can’t be truly honest—just reactive. Witnessing has shown me that the tangled wires are in my basement—they are not a part of me. I’ve learned to look… and judge. Fairly, now. Honestly. Not judge myself, or her, but the wires. I will trace them from where they’re coming from, to where they’re going to.
Instead of walling myself up in my fortress and pretending I don’t have any wires, or using my eraser to forget so hard they cease to exist so, now I can witness. I can watch. I can assess. Sometimes, that’s all that’s needed, and the knots will untangle themselves.
The Fortress and the Eraser both looked calm from the outside. Both let me avoid the risk of being misunderstood, rejected, or told no—and not knowing what to do with that no. They let me call my withdrawal virtuous, when really it was my ego with its chest puffed up, hiding my fear behind itself. Unseen, my fear would try to make the relationship safe by shrinking anything in me that might ask something of it.
That included wants and needs. If I sat on them so that no one could see them, and only I could feel them, then things seemed safe. Disagreement felt high-stakes to me. Not dramatic, not loud, just perilous… like pond-ice cracking under my skates. What if I wanted something she didn’t? What if I asked for something that wasn’t appropriate for someone to ask of another person? What if the answer was no? I experienced that as a much bigger problem than it is in a healthy relationship.
So instead of bringing it forward and trusting the relationship to hold it, I would sit on it. I would work on letting go of the wish, loosening my attachment to the want—if I could outwait a need until it went quiet, then nothing would have to break. Pervertedly, I felt a kind of pride in acting this way; like some kind of self-flagellating ascetic, thinking my noble suffering made me a strong man… even though it made me feel hollowed out at the loss, and shamed for keeping such an intimate part of myself from her.
What I’m learning now is different.
I’m not trying to suppress what I feel, and I’m not trying to extinguish myself away from it either. I’m trying to witness it closely enough that I can understand it without obeying it, and speak it without dramatizing it.
That’s the real floorboard under this card.
There is something that helps that process, and something that stops it. I need a relationship to still feel warm while I’m thinking. Not perfect, not instantly resolved — just warm enough that I know we are still together inside it. I will take her hand so she knows I have not left her alone. Squeezing mine back, she’ll strengthen my resolve. So I can do the work needing done—then come back to her. If instead the atmosphere turns sharp, I stop trying to understand myself and my focus snaps to what suddenly feels frighteningly fragile between us.
There are times when I need space in my own mind, but I do not want that to feel like exile to the person I love. I want her to know she can stay emotionally close to me while I think. I want closeness to remain intact while language catches up.
For the curious, there is a longer arc underneath all this. The younger version of me moved through Stoicism first, then many years of Buddhism, and lately into Vedanta. I still carry something from all three. I’ve moved from fervently denying feeling, then trying to manage myself out of feeling, and finally learning how to observe feeling without letting it run the house (and tangle up the basement wires).
That is a better way of loving, I think.
Not because it makes me above frustration,
but because it lets me stay human inside it.
Close enough to keep holding her hand,
honest enough to return with something real.
