─ Hisham Siddiqi
One day, I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language. I haven't heard from you since.
Not out of anger. Not even misunderstanding. Just—distance. A wordless shift. The kind that doesn’t slam doors, but leaves them quietly ajar, as if unsure whether to close or wait.
You stopped answering in ways I recognized. I stopped speaking in ways you could hold. Since then, I haven’t heard from you.
It’s unsettling, how language can dissolve between two people. How something once fluent—effortless—can become foreign overnight. I’ve thought about where the change began. Was it a misused word? A silence too long? Or was it the slow erosion of a shared code, something once sacred now left untranslated?
But translation has its limits, translations carry with them the ache of approximation. Something is always lost: the texture of a word, the warmth of a tone, the intention behind silence. What is said is never quite what is meant. What is heard is never quite what was given. And in love—especially in love—translation falters. The gestures, the glances, the unsaid things—they need no interpreter when the language is mutual. But when that language fades, what remains?
Maybe that silence wasn’t a wall but a pause. The one that follows the final attempt to translate what no longer finds its meaning. Maybe it was our way of realizing: we no longer understood the same dialect of care. The same inflections of need.
Because love is a language. It’s spoken not just with words, but in attention, in presence, in choosing someone again and again, especially when it’s inconvenient. And when love’s language is no longer shared, no amount of translation can save it.
Still, I don’t carry it as a failure. As Carl Jung wrote, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” We were transformed—at least for a time. And that matters.
So now, I let the silence be. Not as punishment, but as truth. A quiet acknowledgment that we no longer speak what the other needs to hear. And yet, I hope—wherever you are—that your voice is understood again. That you’ve found someone fluent in the particular way your soul asks to be held.
As for me, I am learning to speak differently. To listen with fewer assumptions. To love in a language that doesn’t need to be translated to feel safe.
Because some connections end not in rupture, but in the moment you realize: the language of love must be spoken together. And when it no longer is, what’s left is not failure—but a final line, followed by silence.
