"The Quiet I Couldn't Refuse"

The poem portrays a man haunted by his traumatic past, including childhood abuse and the horrors of war. Struggling with silence, isolation, and an overwhelming longing for peace.

I thought I was incapable of love.
Not for the girl behind the counter,
Not for the silence between us,
Not even for the cigarette clutched between my lips.

My love for her
was like my love for the smoke:
A quiet burn,
A slow death with every inhale.
She burned for me,
And I,
I died in return.

I didn’t speak.
Not because I had nothing to say,
But because the words were buried too deep,
Drowned in the chaos of things I couldn’t escape.
The silence between us,
It was the only place I could hide�"
A safer space than the battlefields of my past.

I never asked her name,
Names are too soft, too tender for someone like me.
She never asked why my eyes
looked like war-torn cities,
Why my breath trembled with ghosts I couldn’t bury.
I never loved in pieces,
I loved like war:
Messy, violent,
Quiet in places where only monsters live.

When I loved her,
I did so like I loved my cigarette
With the bitter certainty
That it would kill me.

Not the silence between our stolen glances,
Not the cigarette trembling between my fingers,
But the fear that held me,
That still gripped my throat,
Grieving for the boy I once was
The boy who fainted in the face of cruelty,
The boy who learned to shut his mouth
Before the pain inside was too much.

And yet, our eyes met once,
Then again,
Then again,
Each look a letter neither of us dared to write.
I’d see her across the counter,
And for a moment,
My ruin felt beautiful.

She smiled once.
It was small.
Almost nothing.
But it broke through me like forgiveness
I hadn’t earned,
Like a promise I couldn’t keep.

And like the smoke I exhaled every night,
She lingered,
Not long enough to stay,
But just long enough to leave a mark
That would never fade.

She was a whisper in a world that never stopped screaming,
A dim light in a room full of shadows,
Like a lit cigarette in the night,
Quietly burning,
Fighting to stay alive
Even when it feels like you’ve already died.

And me?
I was the fool who thought silence meant safety.
That if I kept my mouth shut,
The war would stay buried.
But the truth was,
I was still fighting,
Still trying to outrun the fear
That had me bleeding long before the battlefield.

Like every cigarette I’ve ever lit,
She slipped through my fingers,
Before I even realized I was bleeding,
Before I knew that I’d already been dead
The moment I stepped off that plane.

I don’t blame her.
She never asked to be the wound I couldn’t heal,
Never knew that the boy she saw in me
Was already broken
By fists that came from love I never understood,
By scars that burned deeper than the ones the war left behind.

She burned for me.
Not like lovers do,
But like a flame unaware
That the moth is already ash.

She burned for me.
And I,
Without protest,
Died quietly
So she’d never have to see.

She burned for me.
And I, without a sound,
Without a plea,
Died beautifully for her
For the girl who never asked
For a love that was already lost
Before it even began.

And when I loved her,
I loved like I loved death
A longing that had no end.
I craved it,
Not as an escape,
But as the only peace
I’d ever know.

In the silence,
In the empty nights,
It was always there
The one thing that didn’t betray me,
The one thing that didn’t ask anything of me.

I thought I could outrun it,
But death isn’t something you escape.
It’s the stillness you crave when the world has taken everything
The final, inevitable peace
That lives in the spaces between my breaths.

I have seen death more than multiple times,
In my steps, in my shadow,
In the eyes of the men I left behind,
In the hollow silence of war.
And now,
Death lingers over me,
Promising a peace
I can’t refuse.


And so,
I let her go.
Not because I wanted to,
But because peace always leaves
Just when you need it most.
And I?
I’ve been dying for so long,
I can’t remember when it stopped feeling like a choice.

The nights grew colder,
The walls closer,
And in the silence,
I could hear the death calling
It was no longer a whisper,
But a scream in my head,
A promise of stillness that I could never refuse.

So I answered.
I took the one way out I had left
A final breath,
A final release,
A peace I’d been chasing all my life.

And in that moment,
I felt nothing but the quiet.
The quiet I had been longing for,
The quiet that would never betray me.

I killed myself,
Not because I wanted to die,
But because I was too tired to live
In a world that couldn’t save me
From the things I had seen,
From the boy I had been,
From the war that never left me.

And maybe,
Just maybe,
I’ll find peace in the silence
That finally answers all my questions.