Between Your Silence and Mine
BY: Nartey Tettey Isaac
'My name is Isaac Nartey, and I write what I want to say without ever saying it directly. The meaning lives between the lines, where my honesty feels safest.'
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1. The Love I Tried to Pretend Was
Friendship(His POV)
It started soft, almost harmless, the way most disasters do.
A laugh here, a late night call there, the slow unraveling of my guard every time she said my name like it meant something. I kept telling myself that what I felt wasn’t love, just comfort, just closeness, just coincidence. But you don’t stay up every night for coincidence. You don’t memorize someone’s silences for coincidence.
The truth was simple. I wanted her. Not as a friend, never as a friend. But she had this way of listening that made me afraid to tell
her. Afraid that naming what I felt would shatter whatever fragile thing existed between us. So I swallowed it. Hid it. Let it burn me from the inside. I called it loyalty, patience, timing, but it was fear. Fear of losing her. Fear of wanting too much.
Then she trusted me with the kind of secrets people only give when they don’t expect you to run. Heavy things. Sharp things. Things that made me want to protect her in ways friendship doesn’t cover.
I carried them all, every word, every ache. And somewhere in the weight of it, I convinced myself that maybe loving her quietly was enough.
But the truth has a way of leaking. Mine leaked into how I texted her first, always. How I answered too fast. How I cared too loudly. She noticed. Of course she did.
And when life got hard, when money thinned, when sleep disappeared, when I started leaning on her more than I meant to,I saw something shift. Not in her kindness, but in her distance.
Replies shortened. Calls faded. The warmth dimmed. Like she was backing away from a fire she didn’t trust herself to stand too close to.
I kept telling myself she was tired. That it wasn’t about me. But I knew.
I was asking for a kind of closeness she wanted but didn’t know how to hold. And then came the message, not harsh, not cold, just final. A quiet ending to a love I never got to name.
I reached out, hoping I could pull us back. But she was already gone, not in presence, but in spirit. And I’m left with this ache,the kind that comes from loving someone who loved you too, but couldn’t risk saying it out loud.
Maybe if I had said it first.
Maybe if she had believed herself worthy of being loved like that.
Maybe...
But maybes don’t bring people back. And neither does the love you were too scared to
confess.
2. The Love I Was Too Afraid to Keep (Her POV)
I’ve always been scared of being wanted. Not because I don’t desire it, but because I know what comes after, expectation, vulnerability, the possibility of disappointing someone who saw something in me I never learned to see in myself. And then there was him.
He wanted me. Not the surface version of me. Not the convenient friend I pretended to be. He wanted the real thing, closeness, tenderness, the kind of love you can’t misinterpret.
And God, I wanted him too. More than I will ever admit out loud.
But wanting and trusting are two different languages, and I only speak one. The other stutters on my tongue. I kept telling myself I wasn’t ready. That I’d ruin him the way my past ruined me.
That if he saw how broken I really was, he’d regret ever choosing me in the first place.
So I did what scared people do. I hid behind distance. Behind short messages. Behind silence that I pretended wasn’t silence.
He thought I didn’t care. But caring was the problem. I cared so much it terrified me.
Every time he leaned on me, I felt myself slipping into something deeper. Something I wasn’t prepared to hold. I knew he wasn’t just asking for friendship. He wanted more. And the more he wanted, the more I feared I’d fail him.
He thought I was pulling away from him. But I was pulling away from the future I didn’t believe I was enough for.
So I ended it. Quietly. Gently. The way people do when they hope the softness will make the pain smaller.
He reached out after, and it broke me. Because I knew what he wanted. I knew what I wanted.
But I also knew I wasn’t ready,not for his love, not for the weight of being wanted by someone
who meant every word he said.
Maybe one day, when the pieces of me stop cutting me from the inside, I’ll be able to choose him the way he chose me. Maybe one day, I’ll believe I deserve him.
But for now, letting go was the only thing I knew how to do. And the cruelest part? Walking away didn’t mean I stopped loving him. It meant I loved him enough not to stay and hurt him.
3. The Ones Who Circle Each Other(Observer
POV)
A year changes people, even when they pretend it doesn’t. And watching the two of them now feels like watching a pair of magnets trying to decide whether attraction is a blessing or a curse.
You can’t call it love outright. You can’t call it distance either. It’s something in between, the kind of almost love that lingers in the air before either of them breathes it in fully.
She says she let him go. He says he moved on. But the way she reacts doesn’t match the script.
When he posts another girl, something shifts in her, subtle, but not invisible. The kind of shift you catch only if you’ve been paying attention to her for a long time. Her replies shrink again,
tighten, turn into those clipped little messages that hide more feeling than they reveal. But she doesn’t disappear. She doesn’t leave. She stays close enough to feel something, far enough to pretend she doesn’t.
And then there are the other moments. The ones that contradict everything.
The way she lights up when he shows her a screenshot of her face as his wallpaper,how her heart betrays her before her words can. How she asks for his pictures now, casually, almost like a joke, but not quite. And when he sends them, she says things she never used to say. Little compliments snuck between breaths. Small admissions disguised as observations. She’s more expressive now, more open, like she’s slowly learning the language she once feared to speak.
There’s also the way she asks him to come over. Not once. Not as a courtesy. Often.
Repeatedly. Like a quiet invitation to a reality she’s not ready to define.
And when he does come... she insists he eats. That he rests. That he stays just a little longer. The kind of care you don’t show someone you’re indifferent about. The kind of tenderness that slips out of people who don’t even realize they’re giving themselves away.
You could call it love, if love had a shape. You could call it fear, if fear looked that soft. You could
call it longing, if longing had hands.
The truth is, no one really knows what’s happening between them anymore, not even them.
They’re standing in that strange space between confession and denial, between wanting and waiting, between “not yet” and “maybe.”
From the outside, it looks like two people who lost each other once, trying, carefully, clumsily,
quietly, not to lose each other again.
But whether it’s love, or fear, or habit, or destiny... Only time is brave enough to answer that.
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