I Have Never Said The Month Out Loud

You know the month.

That is what makes your situation different from most of the people who read a site like this. There is no searching to do. You are not going to sit with a pen and try to work out when it started, because you have known the whole time, with the sort of clarity that does not fade.

And you have never said it.

Not to your sister. Not to the friend who asks. Not out loud in an empty room. It has lived entirely inside your head for years, and it has been getting slowly heavier in there in a way that surprises you, because you would have expected a fact to stay the same size.

Facts do not stay the same size in silence. That is what I want to talk about tonight.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old

There is a verse in the Psalms that describes exactly this, and it is more physical than people expect.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. (Psalm 32:3, King James Version)

Two things in that line are worth stopping on.

The first is that keeping silence is not the same as being at peace. He is silent on the outside and roaring on the inside, all the day long, and the roaring is what wears the bones. The silence did not stop the noise. It only stopped anybody hearing it.

You have been roaring all day long where nobody could hear it, and that silence has never once been the peace it looked like from outside. Psalm 32:3 puts the wearing inside the keeping quiet rather than inside the speaking, and the Spirit of God is the one who understands the cost of a thing that has never left a person's mouth.

The second is what it costs him. My bones waxed old. Not my mind. Not my mood. His bones. He is describing a physical wearing, the tiredness in the body of somebody carrying an unsaid thing.

And I want to be careful, because that psalm is about sin and your month is not sin. But the mechanism it describes is not about the content. It is about what unsaid things do inside a person, and that mechanism does not care whether the unsaid thing was your fault.

You are not weak for finding this heavy, and Psalm 32:3 has never once described silence as costless. It is written that the bones waxed old through a roaring nobody heard, and the Holy Spirit is the one who understands the weight of a thing that has never been out of a person's mouth.

You have been carrying a date that has never once been outside your own head. The word puts the wearing in the bones rather than in the conscience, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody in a silence that everybody else mistakes for calm.

Saying it does not make it bigger

Now the fear, because there is one and it is worth naming.

The reason it has stayed unsaid is that saying it makes it real in a different way. In the head it is a fact. Out loud, in the air, in a person's own voice, it becomes something that happened to them, and there is a moment right after the sentence where a woman would be standing in the room with it.

And nobody has ever described that moment, so the worst has been assumed.

You are not walking into the moment your imagination has been building, and no four seconds after a true sentence has ever once been the size you rehearsed. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the seconds right after somebody speaks, and it is written that the bones waxed old in the silence and never in the saying.

What actually happens is much smaller than the imagining. The sentence comes out. The room stays a room. And the thing that has been growing quietly in a sealed container for four years gets, for the first time, a bit of air on it, and the strange truth about grief and shame both is that air makes them smaller rather than larger.

The thing gets bigger in the dark, not in the light. That is the whole of it.

You were never protecting yourself with that silence, and there has never once been a moment where saying it would have made it heavier. Psalm 32:3 puts the whole cost in the keeping of silence and none of it in the speaking, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the four seconds after somebody finally says a thing.

So tonight is one sentence, said once, to nobody.

You are permitted to say it out loud with nobody in the house, and there has never once been a rule that a true thing must be said to somebody to count. It is written that the roaring went on all the day long inside a silence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hears a sentence said to an empty kitchen.

Say it once, then write it

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and it takes about eight seconds.

You have permission to say one true sentence to an empty room, and no rule anywhere has ever once required a listener for a true thing to count. It is written that the roaring went on all the day long inside a silence nobody heard, and the Spirit of God is the one who hears a sentence said at a kitchen sink.

Wait until the house is empty. Say the month out loud. Add one clause. It started in the October when dad died. It started the September I went back to work.

Say it once. Do not repeat it, do not explain it to yourself, do not analyze it.

Then write the same sentence on a piece of paper.

Then stop. Nothing gets cleaned tonight.

You are able to say one true sentence tonight, and saying it has never once put you under any obligation to do anything about it. Psalm 32:3 has the bones wearing under a silence that was never broken, and the Spirit of God is present in a sentence said out loud to an empty room.