Maybe he also understands that there's a point in adulthood where now your mother is the one who vents to you, while you stop telling her things so you won't worry her, and silence becomes a clumsy, misunderstood form of love.
Is it better to speak or to die? Speak. Speak as if it is the last time you breathe. Speak as if tomorrow won’t return and the last thing left in this earth to own—is the voice entrapped between your lips. Speak because it’s the only way for you to live; to exist.
Something that says, ‘a life was lived here.’ That’s all he really wants for himself. And even if it’s kept a secret between the earth and the sky, it’ll be enough for him.
He thinks if he’s going to have a memorial, he’d prefer it to be deep in a forest somewhere, forgotten to time. His name scratched in a tree or something, or a pile of rocks on a hill.
He knows all of this with the intimate certainty of someone who has paid close attention for a very long time.
And still.
He has never once gotten it right.
He knows the geography of him by now, knows exactly how his breath changes when something shifts from casual to not-casual, knows the exact quality of the silence afterward, how it's never quite the same kind of silence as before.
Not because he doesn't want to—that has never been the variable in this equation—but because there's something in him that has always needed it to be an offering before it can be an answer.