Empty Words, Honest Silence

They gather around me with their practiced lines,
voices like dull echoes,
as if comfort could be assembled from clichés.
They mean well, they say,
but even their eyes betray exhaustion—
they want me to shut the door on grief,
to stop infecting their fragile calm.

Their words fall weightless,
like paper on an ocean.
They do not feel the wound as I do;
they cannot.
Their pain is lesser, quieter, survivable.
Mine is marrow-deep.
Their phrases are not born of the soul—
they are reflexes,
imitations of compassion
learned from a culture that demands
the mask of empathy.

Human beings are animals,
but worse:
we invented deceit.
We dress up lies not for survival,
not for food, not for shelter,
but for the hollow theater of appearing kind.
We pretend to mend others
when we do not even know how to mend ourselves.

And so I turn away from words,
from mouths that move without meaning,
and toward silence.
For in silence, my dog, my cat, my companion
offers something truer.
No performance, no hollow verse.
Only presence.
They curl against me,
not because they must,
but because they simply are.

Animals do not barter comfort.
They do not calculate.
They ask only that you live beside them,
feed them, keep them safe.
And in return, they heal you with their being—
their gaze, their warmth,
their quiet dependence.
They teach you that love can exist
without deceit,
without empty words.

Perhaps that is the cruelest irony:
that the creatures we claim to be above
are the only ones who still know
how to love without condition,
how to comfort without lies.