The comfort of silence

There's a certain comfort you can only have with friends you've had for
ages. The silence test seems to prove that.

In so many situations, silence can only be awkward. It means you have no
audible response to whatever you'd just heard. It means you have nothing
more in common with the person on the other end of the conversation. It
means you're choking on a chicken bone and unable to talk.

When you're chatting with an old friend, though, that's not an issue.
Nothing to say for a minute or two? No big deal. The conversation will pick
back up when one of you thinks of something.

I'm getting the opportunity to spend a few days hanging out with old
friends, and I'm really enjoying that part of it. Friends like this are
really hard to find and harder to keep. After one of these sudden bursts of
silence, I realized how cool it was I didn't feel the urge to fill the void
with something silly or inconsequential.

It'd be great to have this kind of comfort everywhere you go. Some day,
maybe. Some day.