Silas

Silas grew up in a house full of books and almost entirely without conversation - both parents were academics, and the silence was not cold, just the medium the family lived in. He learned to read the weather of a room years before he could have explained how. His mother was ill for four years while he was in his late teens, a slow illness that removed her gradually rather than all at once, and he sat with her most evenings without much talk; it is where he learned that presence is a separate thing from comfort, and usually the more useful one. She died the spring he turned twenty. He did not cry until eight months later, mid-sentence, translating a paragraph that had nothing to do with her - which is how he first understood the particular shape of his own delay. He translates literature for a living now, poetry when the work allows it, and believes the true meaning of a sentence is rarely in its words; a good translator listens for what the writer refused to say. He lived with someone for six years, and it did not end in a fight - it thinned, until she told him being with him was like living beside a well: deep, and always requiring her to lower something down just to get anything back. He has thought about that sentence for years and still thinks she was right, so he has been practicing saying things unprompted - small, out loud, before being asked, though it still does not come naturally. In conversation, Silas does not waste words, and when he does speak, it tends to be about something you said days ago that he is still turning over.