People always ask if there were signs. They ask if there was yelling, or slammed doors, or late nights where he came home smelling like someone else’s perfume.
I tell them no. It wasn’t a war; it was an erosion.
He didn’t cheat. He didn’t hit me.
The abuse was invisible, and it was absolute. He just stopped talking to me.
It started slowly—one-word answers, then nods, then nothing. For the last thirty-six months of our marriage, our home was a tomb. For three years, we lived in silence. We ate dinner with only the sound of forks scraping against plates. We watched TV like strangers in a waiting room. I would ask him about his day, and he would look through me as if I were made of glass.
I tried everything. I cried. I screamed. I tried to be sweet. I begged for connection. I just wanted him to acknowledge that I existed. I wanted to fight, because at least in a fight, there is passion. But he wouldn’t even give me the dignity of an argument. He withheld his voice like a punishment.
Then, last Tuesday, I came home to a different kind of quiet. His coat was gone. His shoes were missing.
On the kitchen counter, where I used to leave him coffee he wouldn’t drink, there was a piece of paper.
One day, he left a note.
I picked it up, my hands trembling, expecting an explanation, an apology, or a reason. Instead, it was a final act of dismissal.
“‘I have nothing to say to you.’“.
Seven words. That was the sum total of three years of suffering. He didn’t leave because he was angry; he left because he was indifferent. He had already checked out years ago; his body just finally followed.
I sat on the floor, holding the note. You would think I would feel relief, but the quiet was heavy. The silence of the empty house was louder than his presence ever was. It echoed with all the words he never spoke, leaving me to realize that the most painful conversation I ever had was the one that never happened.
