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Prologue

Silent Diptych is not an illustration but a resonance—a meditation on silence, not as emptiness, but as a state of receptivity.     It is the space where judgment dissolves, where human connection lingers between words, where meaning is felt rather than spoken.     In its stillness, it holds what remains unresolved.     Some silences are quiet.     Others are filled with history.

RFMT

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Our early dinner followed a matinee of “Parade”, a musical steeped in history, in indignity, in the weight of a life taken and a verdict that still hung unresolved.     At the table, we spoke of Leo Frank, the Jewish man lynched in Georgia a century ago–pardoned decades later but never absolved.     His true killer never pursued.

Three of us were Jewish.     They understood, in ways the rest of us could only acknowledge but never quite embody, the particular pain of being made a scapegoat.     The others sympathized but could not feel the same alienation—not in the marrow, not in the inherited way history imprints itself on some more than others.

It was a conversation of weight, but not of sorrow.     We spoke with the clarity that comes when facts are long settled but their reverberations remain.

Then came the interruption.

The woman at the next table turned to us with a question, her voice cutting easily through our discussion.

“Where are the girls?”

I glanced at my companions, the six of us settled comfortably into the familiarity of one another.

“What girls?” I asked, not unkindly.

She blinked, as if expecting the answer to be self-evident.

“We’re already married to each other,” I said.

She turned away without another word.

There was no need to dwell on it.     The moment was familiar.     A minor encounter, the sort that barely registered after years of knowing exactly how the world could tilt in response to our presence.

To shift the conversation, I said, “Freud might say that all relationships are attempts to resolve unfinished business with our parents.”

Someone smirked. A fork was set down.     A momentary silence, not of discomfort, but of consideration.

“Men with their fathers, women with their mothers,” I continued.

The responses were mixed.     Agreement.     Deflection.     A shift in tone.     Some spoke of failing to meet their fathers’ expectations.     Some spoke of hatred.     Some of detachment.     Some of nothing at all.

I mentioned my father.     His certainty that we, his children, would not know how to survive without him.     He meant economically, of course.     His generation had its own understanding of what it meant to endure.

“How many siblings do you have?” someone asked.

“Five,” I said.     “Including my younger sister, who just passed away.”    A pause.    “She was angelic.”    “Sixty-nine.”        

There was sympathy, warm and immediate.    A moment held just long enough.

And then, as if on cue, the conversation shifted—easily, instinctively.     To theater.     To Tony Awards.     To the life and talent of voices long gone but forever recorded.

At the next table, the woman was laughing now, the moment between us already forgotten on her end.

And we, too, were laughing—at something lighter, something that did not ask to be examined too closely.

The moment stayed, unnoticed, but not forgotten.

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Epilogue

Like the painting, the moment lingered—not demanding resolution, but waiting, quietly, to be understood.   The weight of history, the subtleties of belonging, the pauses in conversation where truth is felt but not spoken.   Silence, in the end, is never empty.   It is the space where everything remains.

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Ricardo F. Morín Tortolero

February 16, 2025; Oakland Park, Florida

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