A Compliment I Never Forgot #WriteAPageADay @Blogchatter

I was not looking for it.
That matters.
Compliments hunted feel small,
like coins rubbed smooth by too many palms.
This one arrived
the way dew does—
already there when I noticed the morning.

It happened on an ordinary day,
the kind that does not bookmark itself.
No festival of light.
No grief worth naming.
Just a day moving through me
as days do,
wearing my body like weather.

You said it without ceremony.
Not as a gift,
not as a conclusion,
but as if you were stating
the colour of the sky
to yourself.

“You listen
as if the world
is allowed to finish its sentences.”

You didn’t wait for my reaction.
You turned back to your tea,
steam lifting like a small weather system
between us,
and the moment closed
without applause.

But something in me
stayed open.

At first,
I tried to reject it.
Not because it was untrue—
that would have been easier—
but because it rearranged
a room I had lived in
my whole life.

I had always thought of listening
as a polite absence.
A vacancy I learned early,
sitting in rooms where voices collided
like weather fronts,
where speaking louder was mistaken
for being alive.

Listening was survival then.
A way of becoming small enough
to pass through moments unbruised.
I wore it like camouflage,
never thinking
it could be seen.

Your words
made it visible.

For days after,
they followed me
the way the moon does—
not chasing,
just keeping pace
through different streets of thought.

I heard them while waiting
at traffic lights,
the red blinking like a patient eye.
I heard them in the silence
after phone calls ended,
that brief freefall
before the room remembers itself.

“You listen
as if the world
is allowed to finish its sentences.”

I began noticing
how often the world is interrupted.

Leaves cut off mid-fall
by our hurry.
Birdsong drowned
by engines rehearsing urgency.
Conversations trimmed
into soundbites sharp enough
to travel.

Even pain is rushed.
We hurry it toward lessons,
toward silver linings,
toward closure
like a child pushed
toward adulthood
before their knees have learned
the geography of falling.

Listening, I realised,
is not passive.
It is gravitational.

It bends time.
It slows the collapse of moments
into meaning.
It says:
you may exist here
without proving your worth
in seconds.

That compliment
did not praise my voice.
It did not admire my certainty.
It did not crown me
with cleverness.

It honoured my patience with mystery.

I thought of forests then—
how trees do not interrupt wind.
They translate it.
They allow it to move through them,
altered but intact.

I thought of telescopes
aimed at light
older than language,
receiving messages
that have crossed galaxies
without asking
if anyone is listening.

Listening
is an act of faith.
It assumes
something meaningful is arriving,
even if it cannot yet be named.

The compliment changed
how I remembered myself.

Past moments rearranged,
like stars reclassified
once you know
what to look for.

The friend who cried
and later said,
“I didn’t know I needed
to say all that.”
The stranger on a train
who told me about a life
I would never intersect again.
The pauses I left untouched,
like unharvested fields
resting.

I had mistaken these
for accidents.
You gave them lineage.

Still,
I was wary.

Compliments can be cages
lined with velvet.
They can freeze us
into versions of ourselves
we are expected to perform
forever.

I asked myself:
If I stop listening,
do I lose the right
to this truth?

But the compliment
was not a demand.
It did not say always.
It said as if.

As if the world
is allowed.

Permission.
That was the key.

I had been granting it
without knowing
I had authority.

Authority does not always arrive
with a gavel.
Sometimes it slips into you
through recognition.

Once, walking at night,
I looked up and understood
why ancient people
mapped their myths
onto stars.

Not because the stars asked,
but because silence
invites stories.

The sky does not speak.
It waits.

Listening, I learned,
is how we become large enough
to hold what does not rush.

It is how oceans remember
the shape of the moon.
How stones remember
pressure as patience.
How grief remembers love
without demanding return.

The compliment stayed with me
because it did not flatter my ego—
it expanded my responsibility.

If I can listen,
I must choose
what deserves that space.

Some days,
I fail.

I interrupt.
I anticipate.
I rush to conclusions
like a tourist
checking landmarks off a list
instead of walking the streets.

But now,
I notice the failure.

That, too,
is a kind of listening—
to the gap between intention and action,
to the way awareness sharpens
after being named.

Your words did not perfect me.
They oriented me.

Like Polaris—
not a destination,
just a reliable direction
when everything else spins.

Years later,
I can no longer remember
what you were wearing.
Or the weather.
Or even what prompted
the moment.

But I remember the feeling
of something ancient
being recognised in me.

As if a quiet craft
I had been practicing
without witnesses
was suddenly confirmed
as real.

Compliments fade
when they rest on surface.
This one rooted.

It reached down
into sediment I didn’t know
was holding me upright.

Sometimes,
when the world feels loud
with certainty,
I return to that sentence
like a breathing exercise.

I let it slow my pulse.
I let it remind me
that attention is not scarce—
it is sacred.

And that listening
is not about silence,
but about trust.

Trust that meaning
does not need to be forced.
Trust that people, like planets,
have their own orbits,
their own tempos
of revelation.

Trust that even now,
something is speaking
just beyond my hurry.

If I am lucky,
I will still be listening
when it finishes.

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