“Why even say anything at all?”

“Why even say anything at all?”

By Lauren Cibene

I cannot fault his question.

I have asked myself the same thing many times.

The question cuts its eyes suggestively towards a cozy silence—the one custom-made to fit me by patriarchal structures.

That numb nothingness tailored to suffocate legions of women before me. The grandmothers of my grandmothers.

They fan out behind me, a skein of geese in a persimmon sky, longer by one on my mother’s side. A V of mostly silent souls stretching through time.

“Why say anything at all? It would be so much easier to be quiet.”

It is not wrong. There is a kind of ease in feminine, slender-armed silence.

There is no heavy lifting.

You do not risk saying something wrong.

You do not risk your words being misunderstood.

You do not get asked:

“Why even say anything at all?”

But the echoes of witch hunts still shudder my bones, reminding me that the safety of silence is an illusion.

The powerful will still misunderstand us, condemn us, call us abominations, whether we make our home in their prescribed silence or not.

My belly is tight with the words swallowed by all my grandmothers. Carl Jung said that when spirit becomes heavy, it turns to water. These spiritwords condense, drip down my ribs, press to be born.

I ask myself that same question:

“Why say anything at all?”

My teeth chatter with the pain of bearing, but the idea of passing the weight of things unsaid to my daughter pains me more.

Heavy silence will not be her inheritance.

And though the people I once hoped would hear my words with pride instead call me shrill, disrespectful, loud—I will continue to bear these words.

I will not leave them to wither in the stifling dark.