The Silence That Isn't Peace

She should turn it off. She knows this. She doesn't.

Through the window, the kitchen light is on, and someone is there, and in a few seconds she'll have to be a version of herself that asks how everyone's day was. Nobody would call this a crisis. She isn't crying. Her hands are still on her lap. If a neighbour walked past and glanced in, they might think she was just enjoying a quiet moment before heading inside — the kind of pause people are told to take more of. It looks, from the outside, exactly like rest.

It isn't rest. Rest has a texture to it — a loosening, a returning. This has no texture at all. It's the particular stillness of someone who has run out of somewhere to put anything else, and so has simply stopped taking anything in. The list is still there. The unread messages are still there. The thing her sister said on Tuesday that she hasn't had time to feel yet is still there, filed somewhere just out of reach, waiting for room that hasn't existed for weeks.

The difference only shows up in the smaller, stranger moments. A song comes on that she loves, one that usually gets her singing along badly, and she notices, with something like curiosity, that nothing happens. Not sadness. Not even irritation at the wasted song.

Inside, the kitchen light is warm and the kettle's already on and someone asks if she's alright, and she says yes, because in the version of alright that means not currently in crisis, she is. She unpacks the shopping. She answers the question about school shoes. Somewhere in the unpacking, she finds herself talking about something that happened at work, and halfway through the sentence she notices she means it — that there's a flicker of something under the tiredness, a thread still attached to the person telling the story.

It was nothing, really. A colleague had left a card on her desk, signed by people she barely speaks to most weeks. At the time she'd felt nothing at all — just noted it, the way you note a text arriving, and moved on. It's only now, telling it badly at the counter, that something in it reaches her. Not the card itself. The noticing of it, arriving late, the way a sound sometimes reaches you a second after you see the thing that made it.

It isn't much. It isn't the return of everything at once. It happens not because she solved anything in the driveway, and not because sitting there fixed what three months of everything had worn down. It happens because for one moment, standing at the counter with a bag of shoes she still has to return, something ordinary got through.

Later, taking the bins out, she notices the drive is wet and shining under the streetlight, though she doesn't remember it raining. The clouds have thinned somewhere overhead, just enough that a bit of moon is showing through the gap. She stands there a second longer than the bins require, and thinks, without quite deciding to think it, that the rain is clearing.