But sometimes, just sometimes, after some incident, you don't make any promise to others, not even to yourself, but without any promise, a silence settles within you and this silence you propagate around you as well.
You become a quiet person. You lock that talkative, bubbly person somewhere deep down and then you throw away the key.
And not many people realize that. Because some people only knew you as a quiet person, for them you are the same.
And those who did know how cheerful you actually are fail to notice because from where they are standing, you are fine and you are happy. Because you smile when you meet someone and you smile at jokes cracked by your friends and hold back a retort.
But from where you are standing you understand that the smile on your face when you meet people is the smile that you put on to hide the tears in your eyes, so that the focus shifts to the smile instead of the tears.
And you know that when you smile at a joke cracked by a friend and hold back a retort, it is because you don't have anything to say, because silence is your refuge now.
And quietly and silently is how you start spending your days. And quietly and silently you start to remove yourself. You don't remove people from you lives, instead you remove yourself from theirs, because if someone detests you so much, isn't it better to save them the torture of having to look at you, or even seeing your name somewhere, or seeing anything that would remind them of you?
So quietly and silently you step out of their lives. And with a final goodbye you close the door and you never look back.
These are the silent pledges of silence.
