The quiet after the storm

God's poet is silence! His song is unspoken,
And yet so profound, so loud, and so far,
It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken,
And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star.
~Joaquin Miller

And now... silence.

Everything I shouted from the roof tops, the dark secrets I let spill from my lips. It all lays there in a tangled mess, and it seems almost as if it has done nothing but stun us into complete silence. Not that we aren't dealing with it. We are. Steadily, working through all that needs to be fixed, and doing it together. But there is an unmistakable air of things unsaid.

It's a tension that wafts in between us at times, like a shifting fog. Never staying for long, but it hovers thick and heavy while it's there. It's interesting, because in a way it's also kind of a good thing. One thing we came to agree on during the long heart-to-heart (that I needed so badly a month ago) was that to be better to each other, we also had to be better to ourselves. Part of the silence that now prevails is just the two of us, each taking the time to look inside so we can better see what it is we are projecting to the outside - to each other.

I see that now. For the past two weeks, I've been looking at it very differently (and to my detriment). I realise that I had been acting like a small child, who opens one eye and peeks up from his morning prayers to check what the other kids are doing. I did my 'work' and when I was ready, I peeped up at him and got frustrated that his head was still bowed.

I huffed and puffed (in my own head, of course) about how he had retreated from me after he had said we'd do it together. All the time, I never stopped to think that perhaps I needed to just take him at his word and rather try keeping my own head down for a little longer and checking if I didn't still have stuff I needed to refine.

There's a road that we committed to when we had that talk - a road that we promised to travel together. For me to doubt the sincerity of his promise now would serve no purpose, especially when - in actual fact, his actions have shown only that he fully understands what I told him and that he knows what he needs to do.

I said before that all those titles were too big for me to hold on my own. I've told him that. He understood. So time to stop complaining. He's my full partner now, like I asked . It's ok if, every now and then, he just chooses to be a silent one.