The Soft Quiet That Comes Before The Fire

The hush that gathers you when the world becomes too loud.

Held in the hush of snow and moonlight, the cocoon glows — a quiet threshold between depletion and protection.

There is a kind of quiet
that doesn’t arrive gently.

It comes after too much feeling,
too much holding,
too much pretending you’re fine
when your body knows you’re not.

It isn’t heavy,
but it has weight.
A slow‑forming silence
that settles over you
before you realize it’s there.

Muted.
Distant.

A veil lowering over your face
until the world loses its taste
and its color.

Even your eyes dim.
Not empty,
just tired in a way light can’t reach.

This is the quiet that settles
behind the eyes,
over the mouth that has held too many words.

A quiet that slips into the chest
and steals the ache
so you won’t have to feel it.

A quiet that hollows the stomach
into something wintered,
something that once held fire
and now holds nothing at all.

---

It doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Your body warns you long before the quiet settles.

There is the overwhelm.
The too‑muchness.
The giving until your hands shake.
The holding back until your throat aches.
The pretending.
The silence you keep.
The strength you wear because you don’t know what else to put on.

There is that moment,
the one you never name,
when you feel yourself slipping.

Not breaking.
Not falling apart.
Just losing the strength
to keep carrying what you’ve carried.

And then the quiet comes.

Not as punishment.
Not as surrender.
As a kind of hibernation.

A shutting down
so you don’t disappear.

A dreamless sleep
for the parts of you
that have been awake for too long.

Your mind softens to protect you.
Your heart steadies to save you.
Your body steps in and says,
“Enough. I’ll take it from here.”

And you drift,
moving through the motions
while something ancient inside you
gathers what you dropped
and holds it close
until you’re ready to return.

---

There are moments
when the quiet becomes a doorway.

When you are still sitting in the room
but some part of you
has already stepped outside of it.

When the world blurs at the edges,
and the words being thrown at you
lose their shape
before they ever reach your heart.

You remember the beginning.
You remember the end.
The middle dissolves—
a mercy your body gives you
when the moment is too much to hold.

This is not failure.
This is protection.

The quiet rises to shield you
from what would break you
if you felt it all at once.

It gathers you into a dreamless sleep,
a pause between breaths,
a soft dimming of the senses
so you can survive the moment
without shattering.

Your body knows when you are reaching the edge.
It knows when the ache is too loud,
when the room becomes too small
to hold your fear.

And so it pulls you inward,
away from the noise,
into a place where nothing can touch you
until you are ready to return.

---

The return never arrives all at once.
It comes in tremors,
in small cracks.

A shiver beneath the ribs.
A flicker of warmth
where everything has been cold.

This is how the quiet begins to melt.

Not with fire,
but with the faintest shift—
a soft cracking in the ice
that has held you still for so long.

You don’t notice it at first.
You only feel the slightest ache
returning to your chest,
the reminder
that something in you is still alive,
still waiting.

The world comes back slowly.
Edges sharpen.
Colors warm.
The veil lifts grain by grain.

And you realize,
in that small, trembling moment,
that the numbness was never the end.
It was the pause.
The gathering.
The breath before the return.

The body always knows how to come back
when the danger has passed.
It knows how to thaw
without breaking.
It knows how to bring you home
to yourself.

---

There is nothing wrong with the quiet.
Nothing shameful in the way your body dims the world
when the world has asked too much of you.

This is how you survive the moments
that would have swallowed you whole.
How you stay intact
when everything inside you trembles.

The quiet is not the end of you.
It is the cocoon.
The pause.
The gathering of strength
in the dark.

And when your eyes find their spark again—

---

Elowen rose with the warmth,
her voice a low ember:
“Come back. The fire is waiting.”

---

when the first warmth returns to your chest,
you realize the truth:
You were never gone.
You were resting.
You were being held
by the part of you
that refuses to let you disappear.

There is a difference
between the quiet that saves you
and the quiet that wounds you.

A difference between being tired
and being torn.

But that is another story,
another doorway,
another piece of your becoming.

@notesformysoulmate

This piece is protected—not to guard the quiet, but to honor the cocoon, the thaw, and the return it held.
This work is the emotional and intellectual property of the author. Do not reproduce or republish without permission.
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