The Silent Turn-off
Disillusionment doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It comes quietly, as grains of sand in the softness of what once felt smooth — irritations so small at first you almost dismiss them, until one day you can’t.Her talk of being organised, of getting things done, impressed at first. But repeated too often, it felt less like confidence and more like advertising, a credential presented over and over, as if persuasion were the point.
There was that quiet alignment with fashionable views, always leaning toward the consensus branded as “woke.” Delivered with assurance: In North America, we’re more advanced in our thinking. Not smug, but certain. As if moral clarity could be mapped on a globe and as if as unfounded ideologies adopted by the western world was in any way an advancement of human sopirit…
She spoke of women as goddesses, divine, wise, powerful. Men however, in her telling, were rarely capable of lofty intentions or higher perspectives… You listened, wondering how you could trust that she held you in esteem when you were, unavoidably, one of them.
When you tried to touch the subject of the pandemic. She carried herself as one who dispensed wisdom about balance, contentment, and the architecture of a well-lived life. But when you spoke of the lies we had been told from the beginning, her composure slipped into something close to panic. She deflected, even avoided. And finally, her argument reduced to: everyone is free to believe what they want. How convenient, when belief becomes a shield against looking at what one has not dared to research…
Even intimacy, as warm and joyful as it was, came with its own unease. She told you you’d awakened something she thought age had taken away, called you a saviour for reviving it. But saviours carry burdens. And you wanted a partner, not a role.
Then came the conversations that never finished. Your words would begin, she’d cut across, and what you had to say was gone, never returned to, never retrieved. The accumulation of interruptions began to sound like a quiet verdict: that her voice mattered more.
Yet the real grain of sand revealed itself in a different moment; when the world split open with violence and atrocity, you listened for her moral voice, but nothing… You thought she might plant her flag in the soil of principle. Instead, she turned angry that her values were invited to be expressed, even in that safe space that you were in.
None of this was cruel. None of it was deliberate. But it was enough. Small ruptures in the fabric, small shadows on the light. And one day you looked around and realised the “promised land” wasn’t home. It was a place you had passed through, leaving you with lessons, not a dwelling.
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