A Shape of Silence

He slid into my DMs like heat under a closed door; barely visible, but unmistakably there. First, he said I looked good. Then, he said I looked dangerous. And then, as if caught in a spell of his own making, he said he didn’t know why he was messaging me.

F. is my friend’s boyfriend. Still is. His words – uninvited, lilting, deliberate – arrived dressed in just enough ambiguity to feign innocence. Compliments laced with implication. Apologies sewn with seduction. There was a stillness after each message, as though he were waiting for the match to light. I didn’t respond; not in the way he wanted. And still, the messages came.

He said, “Can I ask you a question?” It was soaked in irresponsibility. I knew whatever followed would scatter me; not the self I meet the world with, but the quieter me. The me I hold elsewhere. Disembodied. Fraudulent. A lie.

I thought: What is it you want to be absolved of: the desire, or the act?

When I finally called it what it was, when I said, “This isn’t appropriate” he folded into the soft, slippery shape of the confused man. Said he didn’t know what came over him. Said he “wasn’t thinking clearly”. Said, almost like an incantation, that he was sorry.

But sorry isn’t sterile. It doesn’t undo what it interrupts. It doesn’t reassemble the air between two women now pretending nothing has happened.

I never told her. I didn’t need to. I kept it tucked away, convinced I could contain it, until it began to fracture the image of friendship I’d clung to so dearly. I know now the most dangerous truths are the ones spoken in jokes. I made it jovial, later, telling a friend-of-a-friend that I was feeling uncomfortable. Displaced. Uneasy about coming to dinner, afraid I might bump into him.

Now, I can’t look at her for more than a few seconds without feeling like a crack in her mirror.

There is a language of closeness between women that isn’t spoken, but lived. It’s side-long. Body-based. A glance across a room. A pause in the kitchen. A shared lipstick in a too-small pub toilet. When a man inserts himself, uninvited, into that language – into us – he doesn’t just breach intimacy. He vandalises it.

We don’t speak in that old tongue anymore. The one that held ease and reciprocity. The freedom to feel safe inside each other’s longings. We talk now in placeholders. Surface things. The only acknowledgement of this quiet violence is a strained, “I love you. No, babe. I really do,” said too quickly, too rehearsed, when our eyes finally meet and hover; fragile, afraid.

The music of ease is gone. She still holds him. I still say hello. We still try to laugh. We still hug.

The performance is pristine.

But the aftermath lives in me like a second spine.

She doesn’t know I feel this way, or maybe she does. Maybe she senses the temperature shift when I enter the room. Maybe she notices the way I flinch when silence falls between us. Maybe she hears the hesitation when she says I love you, and I falter before saying it back.

But women are taught not to believe our instincts. Taught to sand down suspicion into silence. If she suspects my disgust of him, she’s learnt to mitigate it.

The worst part isn’t what he said. It isn’t even what he implied. It’s what it did to us. That’s the wound.

F. aiming his desire at me shouldn’t feel like betrayal. But it does. Because her closeness to him has rewritten my closeness to her.

The betrayal lives in micro-silences now: hugs that hover, the laughter that never quite lands. When we sit across one another, it’s like choosing to remain mute inside a burning building. I wonder, if I told her what this has done to me, would I be believed? Or would I be punished for breaking the illusion?

I don’t want him. Not his crooked apologies. Not his late-night spirituality. Not his indecision wrapped in yearning.

I don’t want to be the woman other women blame when men behave like men.

I want to believe sisterhood can survive a rupture like this. That our intimacy might be stronger than his weakness. But I don’t know if that’s true.

There is no clean way out of this.

What haunts me most is the guilt. That I feel ashamed of the space I occupy in her orbit, simply because F. projected his desires into it. That I’ve become smaller inside our friendship because of his cowardice. Because of his trespass. Because of his gaslit confusion.

Now I edit myself around her. Speak in lighter tones. Laugh a little too loudly. Rely on others to fill the gaps.

To be alone together might be too much. Might be annihilation.

This is what structural violence looks like: not a scream, but a wedge. A quiet undoing. One that lodges between women and keeps us from reaching for each other when a man wants us both to disappear.

He hasn’t touched me, but he has trespassed. He has taken something. A sanctuary. A softness. A shared joke.

Now, everything we say to each other has an echo behind it. An echo of what we dare not say.

I want to take her hands and tell her everything. But I also want to protect her from the knowing that might unhouse her.

There’s a cruel intimacy in holding someone else’s truth while they smile at you. While they tell you about their weekend, their website, their life. While they post about him like he is solid. Like he is kind.

I hate that I am complicit. That I am performing neutrality. That I have inherited his lie and dressed it in silence.

This isn’t about being believed. It’s about mourning a friendship that still exists in form, but not in feeling. We are still “close”. But the closeness is scripted now. A performance of normalcy neither of us can exit without consequence.

He has rewritten the map of our relationship. She is still kissing him in photographs. I am still burdened by his voice in my inbox. We are still pretending that nothing has happened.

But something has.

And it lives in the unease between us. It lives in the space where once, we used to speak freely.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
FOUNDING EDITOR: P. ELDRIDGE
DESIGN: CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN

FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy

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