Ode to Silence
Monday August 18, 2025: 5:16pm
Just like that, I was alone in the place we once called home.
Where I woke up to you softly breathing beside me.
The place that barely seven days prior was filled with your warmth.
Your laugh.
Your sounds.
The tapping of your keyboard from across the room, and your voice seeping through the cracks of the bedroom door during your weekly work meetings.
Then suddenly a tap of a finger, a parting hitched sob, cocked and loaded in my throat ready call out and let go, but it was the worst kind of pain. The kind that produces no sound, and it didn’t escape my lips.
Just like that, the room fell silent and a piece of my soul did too.
Our home had never felt so hallow and empty of you.
I know you were real because traces of you are sprinkled throughout.
I still trip on your heels.
See one of your necklaces or a fallen lost earing searching for its match in the carpet.
I’ve been washing the same clothes I packed in my duffle bag, so I don’t have to go in the closet and see all the clothes you’ll soon come get.
I’ve been working at your desk with our pictures still up on the bookshelf and your cork board because I can’t touch them. I don’t want to.
All of your groceries are in the fridge just like you left them. I think maybe if I leave them there it will seem like you are coming back and like nothing has changed.
But I know that’s false hope.
Just like that, I’m waking up on your side of the bed, alone, and greeted to the break of a new dawn to deafening silence.
Your breaths don’t fill the room anymore.
Your warmth doesn’t fill our bed.
Just like that, our home has never felt so icy and deplete.
And the dog still hasn’t stopped checking for you on your side of the bed when he comes home.
