On the Things We Do Not Say
On the Things We Do Not Say "The rest is silence." —Shakespeare, Hamlet There are moments—arriving usually when the kettle is just beginning to hiss, or the rain has finally committed itself to the evening, settling against the glass with that particular, unhurried permanence that makes the indoors feel like a confession —that a sentence forms. It rises with a sudden, absolute certainty; it gathers the breath, demands to be spoken, and then, in the precise fraction of a second before it breaches the lips, it is quietly, deliberately killed just behind the teeth. We clamp our jaws shut. We offer the smile (the particular smile, the one requiring entirely too many muscles, the one that fools nobody, least of all ourselves). We let it go. It dies there. And something in it, paradoxically, lives. One must speak one's truth! they insist—loudly, persistently, with the evangelical certainty of those who have never once considered that to beat the air with...
