The Quiet
PATRICK:
It’s an uneasy feeling… the quiet. No sound is out of bounds, I’m tuned into everything – the tick of my watch, the radiator’s croaks and splutters, even my own heartbeat, would you believe it? God, we’re fuelled by distractions. Any noise or stimulation to take our mind off the places we don’t dare go is welcome. Maybe that’s why I talk to you. To combat the quiet. I’m not winning, if that’s what you’re wondering.
It’s not like silence is new to me or anything. I learnt how to occupy myself before I could even walk, what with Dad living elsewhere, and Mum always working. No, I’m no stranger to filling the void. It’s not my own silence that’s maddening: it’s everybody else’s.
Before you left and everything turned upside down, there was always this buzz in the air, always something going on. You’d be watching some stupid soap opera in that chair, laughing away at unoriginal jokes, gasping at the most predictable of twists. Mum would stomp around the hallway on the phone, nattering to friends and colleagues, making breakthroughs in her career while conjuring up schemes for some big surprise for the whole family. Greg would be drilling yet another shelf in the wall or mowing the lawn for the fifth time this month, and the bloody dog would yap constantly to scare off a magpie in the garden or the terrier next door.
But now we all just keep to ourselves… quiet, like we’re all at opposite ends of a lifeless cosmos. Even the dog knows there’s a piece missing. He lies in his bed with his head on his paws. The rest of us sit in silence in our rooms, alone, because there is nothing to say to explain any of this. Nothing that could even fill a fraction of the gaping vacuum you left behind. The house has become a museum, a pitiful caricature of the place it was when you gave it life. It’s not a home anymore, just a carcass of brick and paint. It’s like one of those fossils you find on the beach sometimes – you know, those shells that aren’t really shells but just… hollow imprints of what came before?
And when days like today happened… well you were the one I went to. Every time. Because you always listened, and never judged, and you always knew the right thing to say. And even when you didn’t say a word I felt better because I knew you cared and understood and that despite everything that had happened, whatever I might have done, you still… you…
Where did you go? Mum keeps saying you’re in a better place, but where is that? And what was so wrong about this world when you were in it? Greg believes people stay alive in our memories, in our hearts, but I can’t feel you, and every day that goes by I forget just a little bit more. God, I’m not even sure I remember what you sound like.
I need you, Grandpa. I need someone to help me through this. I need it all to make sense again. Because right now it feels like the whole world died with you. And I’m the only one left to mourn it…