Flames and Footfalls

On Trust, Silence, and the Unspoken Exit
(Part of the My Wall Series)

There is a kind of silence that doesn’t arrive all at once. It enters gradually, almost politely — the silence between one breath and the next, between a question and an answer that never comes.
It doesn’t announce itself as silence at first. It pretends to be space, a pause, a kindness offered to protect something fragile.

Until one day, it is the only language left.

In mythology, the great endings come with force – according to the  Shiv Puran, when Sati’s breath left her body, Shiva’s grief had no patience for silence. He danced the Rudra Tandav, the dance that breaks the bones of the world, the dance that shakes the sky until even the stars lose their grip. It was not mourning in the way mortals understand it — no tears, no whispered prayers. It was destruction as language, destruction as memory, destruction as the only way to make space for something after the unbearable truth of absence. 

With every footfall, the earth fractured — but not out of rage alone. It was the weight of love with nowhere to go, the weight of all that had been entrusted between them, now pressing into the soles of his feet. His dance was a dialogue — not with the living, but with the void she left behind. He gave the silence shape. He made it visible, tangible, impossible to ignore.

But what happens when there is no dance?
When the person beside you does not die, does not disappear — but slowly steps back, just beyond reach, until the silence between you becomes impassable?

Some silences do not crack the earth.
Some silences grow roots, weaving themselves through rooms and words, until everything said is filtered through caution and hesitation. And unlike Shiva’s storm of grief, these silences leave nothing broken enough to rebuild — only a fragile quiet that becomes the only truth one has to live with.

There is another story, far from Kailash, but just as ancient — the story of the lover who belonged to the sea. She walked on land for a time, beside a mortal who believed he could hold her, but the tides inside her were older than language, older than trust, older than the fear of losing or being lost. The sea called her back — not in a voice anyone else could hear, but in the quiet hours, when her lover’s breathing was too even, when the silence left space for the truth to slip through. She returned to the waves not because she stopped loving him, but because she never trusted the land enough to stay exposed. The sea knew her in ways the earth never could — it knew the parts of her too fluid to hold, too restless to anchor, too honest to explain.

It is a story repeated, again and again — lovers who belong to the sea, who try for a time to live on land, but trust does not come easily to those who have always had the pull of something else, something that can only be known in silence.

What happens to the one left onshore? What do they do with the silence where someone’s laughter used to live? How long does it take to stop hearing waves in every pause?

And what of the Phoenix, that fragile, foolish creature born not of flesh, but of flame? The Greeks imagined her radiant and eternal, wings of fire spreading wide over her own ruin — but was it courage that built her pyre, or the kind of exhaustion that comes when memory is heavier than any body? Did she choose to burn, or did she run out of ways not to?

The texts say the Phoenix sings as the flames consume her, a high, mournful note that splits the sky. But what if, sometimes, there is no song?  What if the flames rise, and the only sound is the cracking of bone, the hiss of feathers surrendering to heat, and the faintest whisper of a name — spoken not as invocation, but as surrender? 

In the ashes of Delphi, where oracles once saw visions through smoke and heat, did they ever see the ones who did not rise? The Phoenix who stayed in her cinders, too tired to remake herself. The ones whose wings remembered the weight of someone else’s hands and refused to open again. What happens to the birds who burn without being reborn?

And what happens to the gods who stop dancing — when the earth no longer trembles, and the air no longer parts to make way for fury? What if the dance ends, but the silence stays?
What if the silence becomes its own kind of god, vaster and more patient than any destroyer, filling every crack left by the fall? What if the silence settles in the throat, thick as smoke, until there are no words left to name what was lost?

The myths are generous to gods. 
Shiva could dance his fury into the world, leaving no doubt that love had once stood in the space now occupied by ruin.
But human endings are rarely so honest.
There are no broken skies, no cinnamon flavoured fires, no rivers reversed, no footfalls loud enough to shake the earth.
There is only the silence after someone chooses not to trust enough to stay.

The myths offer answers for fire, for storm, for grief that roars loud enough to tear the sky apart. But they offer no answers for the quiet unraveling. For the moments when two people stand side by side, each wondering whether the other is still there — and neither willing to ask.

Perhaps the true opposite of trust is not betrayal, but hesitation. Not the act of leaving, but the quiet decision to hold back, to step inward rather than outward, to let silence fill the space where courage once stood. It is not betrayal, not abandonment, just the slow retreat of someone who needed the safety of silence more than the risk of being known.

This silence does not clear space for creation.
It does not burn like Shiva’s fire or cleanse like the tide.
It simply settles — 
first between conversations,
then between breaths,
until it becomes the only thing shared.

And when the silence becomes the only thing left —
when trust has thinned to nothing,
when both people have put a cost to speaking too plainly —
what, then, is there to rebuild?

The silence becomes the only proof that something fragile once existed —
something that neither could hold, and neither was brave enough to let break.

History is replete with example of some loves ending with fire, some ending with storms. But most — most loves end in silence. The silence of withheld truths, of hands that do not reach back, of conversations that step carefully around everything that matters most. 

And in the end, it is the silence — not the fire, not the storm — that is remembered longest. Because silence leaves nothing to mourn, nothing to rebuild, and nothing to blame.

It leaves only the questions – 
Was it fear that kept them silent?
Or was silence the only trust ever truly shared?