The Silence

Before the first word

there was a silence

so complete

it remembered everything.

Not the silence of empty rooms,

but the silence inside a seed

waiting beneath winter soil,

holding forests

no one has seen yet.

We are born from that silence.

We arrive crying—

not because the world is cruel,

but because the soul has suddenly become too large

for the small body of a moment.

And so we spend our lives

trying to remember.

We build cities of language,

towers of certainty,

maps of tomorrow—

but every night the stars rearrange themselves

just to remind us

that we never truly knew the sky.

A child asks why

and the universe trembles.

An old man asks nothing

and the universe listens.

Between those two questions

a whole lifetime passes

like a river

that believes it is traveling forward

while secretly

it has always been returning

to the ocean.

Look closely at people.

The woman laughing in sunlight

carries entire winters in her chest.

The man who speaks the loudest

is often building walls

around a small trembling truth.

And the quiet ones—

the ones who watch clouds

as if they are reading a sacred text—

they have discovered something dangerous:

that meaning

is not something we find.

It is something

that slowly finds us

when we stop running.

Time is not a clock.

It is a sculptor

carving memory

into the fragile stone of breathing.

Every goodbye

is a chisel strike.

Every love

a softening of the edge.

And when the final moment arrives

it will not feel like an ending.

It will feel like

a door that was always open

finally noticing

that you have come home.

Until then

we walk through days

carrying invisible galaxies

behind our ribs,

forgetting

that the same darkness

we fear in the night sky

is the very place

where the stars are born.

Written by Prakshay Pedhadiya, a 7th grader interested in learning, reading, and writing.