Just Silence

Unraveling the Silence of Loss & Guilt

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organised as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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It was never about you. It was always about us. How we failed you. Perhaps we stopped listening because the sounds that erupted from your flawless mouth were imbued with such pain that they drowned us out. You were occupied by that pain that birthed along with you and that mass of placenta. You were never still, and so you craved stillness, for something that you could never be; you became a bundle of cravings. 

And so you overflowed with improbable visions that would often rouse you in the most oblique moments. They roused us, too. It’s no wonder you craved silence, but it turned into isolation.

You kept it from us, but we already knew more than you. We watched the way you drifted through childhood, taking a back seat when things became too substantive. You were always too sincere. Too sincere. Remember how I told you? Keep something back, I said. And so you did.

Do you remember that time when you came home stoned for the first time and said you were a little drunk? Who did you think you were talking to? We mingled with the dirt that danced alongside us at raves in the 90s. Do you think we stayed up all night because we drank Red Bull?

We found the tan leather pouch (where did you get a leather pouch?) that hung from a nail behind your dresser. How could we not? That was careless. We knew about the pocket beneath the driver’s seat of your blue Ford Fiesta, saw the trails of powder on the dash, crumpled foil, lighters, packets of Hubba Bubba everywhere. We knew about your walks at night, about how you had a habit of sneaking out by the back door, a little clumsy upon return.

You did everything we could have hoped – you attended your classes while your friends played pool at the uni bar. You always had a book at the table and seemed to read a lot. You did read a lot. I saw you. We all saw you. We'd be on the long couch eating popcorn and watching the West Wing and you would read, sometimes one of those fantasy novels with embossed gold lettering on the cover, other times Bukowski.

Were you reading? Or were you plotting how you could leave the house at nine-thirty at night to catch up with friends? You were not allowed to leave the house, though. We maintained that rule. Our only rule, which you flaunted because we could never punish you.

We knew all that and did nothing because we figured uni is meant to be about experimentation. We turned out fine, didn’t we? We never wanted to be pushy just because everyone expected you to fit you into a predesigned box (a different box, not this box, not the one surrounded by chants and the deathly frankincense vapour that makes me sneeze until my insides feel like they want to flee my body and climb into that wooden box with fake brass handles, and covered in white lilies).

It all came hurrying back though, all the doubts.

Did you...?

Were you...?

Did we...?

When…?

The uncertainties roared at me at the precise moment when I opened the back sliding door to find you face down, floating on the delicately-wrinkled surface of the pool. The full, strawberry moon (why did it have to be a full moon?) sparkled across the lapis lazuli water, like you see in Bob Ross paintings. You drifted from west to east, spoiling the moon’s glow. These are all the thoughts that scrambled for attention in that moment between the sound of the sliding door scraping open and the solitary scream that shook the double-paned glass behind us.

I fell into the water first, shoes on, bag slung across my shoulder, because you don't take them off when you see someone floating face down in a shimmering pool of water just as you don't stop to remove your clothes if you're having furtive transgressive sex at work or at a pub like they show on the tele. I'm not myself, you know I don't normally talk like this. My head's not the same. I'm getting worse. If I say something you don’t like, try to understand. When the moment comes, you don’t stop for anything, not even your racing thoughts.

Death is expansive, isn’t it? When someone so close dies, you die too, the plants die, uneaten food sheds a colourful patina of bacteria but I don’t care, I don’t eat. Instead, the ambiguities and disappointments eat at me. In the moments after we pulled you to the edge of the pool, I died and saw the tunnel, then was flung back by God or St Peter or whomever that old man is in the sky, he just tossed me back and said: Not so easy; you’re obliged to feel the pain, too. You will know it every day, intimately. You will be known by your pain; it will be your legacy.

I ask if you'll come back; I pray even though I never pray, and I'm left with nothing but thunderous silence. Should I have prayed more, before all this? Did it happen because I didn’t pray? My mother said she used to see me praying at night when I was little, that I would kneel beside the bed, my hands together, whispering the Hail Mary (I wasn’t; I was praying that my father would leave his cigarettes at home when he went to work so I could sneak one). Does the Virgin Mary feel like I’m taking advantage of her for my own self-absorbed desires for cigarettes and you? I should have been holier, gone to church, stopped smoking and drinking. I should have led by example. Was this my karma or am I mixing up my religions.

The house is not the same. We don’t speak. We don’t sleep in the same bed because I’m waiting for you to jump in after a nightmare. It’s so quiet and uncomplicated. We don’t mention your name because to do so would be to invoke an indignity we didn’t know could be real. Instead we don’t speak at all, we grunt and sigh; we understand each other this way.

The other day, I read in Substack that peace and quiet are for the wealthy. Let them have it. I used to urge you to be quiet while I read or wrote or cooked. You want silence when you're watching a movie or reading the paper, so I would tell you to get outside, go see friends, stop being so loud because I had a lot to do, as though I were the la-de-da lady of the manor who needed time for contemplation, time for me. I like silence. But this silence is unlike anything that’s come before, when I longed for it.

You want noise at dinner, while watching the World Cup and Eurovision. You can't have silence then. We don't much like silence in the morning either, before coffee, yes, but not after. After coffee, we’re like a murmuration of starlings, a sky filled with murmurations that shit all over God’s red Dolce & Gabbana loafers. We used to be three, and the squawking and the endless shitting on one another was eternal. We danced, pass me this, go get that, what’s on for today, have you studied for that exam, who’s she (we have a deal, where were you last night until 1am)?

Did you fear death? Or did you seek it out? That last time when you came back from the camping trip, you were shaken and inconsolable because that girl had left you again. I saw the signs then, I heard them as you pleaded with her on the phone, the promises of trying harder, of doing better, the tugging and the please don’t leave me.

Why did you choose the pool? As the opiates smothered your perfect human form, did you decide at the last moment to plunge into the water so there would be no chance of recovery? They tried. The paramedics rolled you to your side while I was held back. I didn’t hear a thing, not while they spoke over you with thunderous urgency, nor as water spewed from your lungs. I didn’t perceive the panic while they pumped your chest like we had practised on a dummy one time at work. Dummies aren’t real though, are they? You didn’t seem real to me either, nor did the strangers who tended to you on the edge of the pool (that fucking pool, why did we still have a pool when we stopped using it years ago?) I didn’t have an out-of-body experience, or float above the scene like I’m sure I did that time I broke my toe when the Roomba dropped onto it and I had to have it stitched back together late at night at the hospital with only a twilight anaesthetic between me and reality.

The three uniformed strangers shook their heads and sat back on their haunches, avoiding me (or maybe they didn’t see me because I, too, was not real).

We’ve been shot down with a slingshot. So much easier to shoot us down like that than it ever was when I tried to trap rats in the haystack when I grew up on that lonely farm. There was silence then, too. I knew loneliness, the excruciating solitude that left me wordless, a book at the dinner table while everyone around me chattered and squawked and shat on one another as though it were their last day.

I longed for a full house, I wanted more of you, others to fill all of the nooks and crannies, the voids that peppered my childhood. Didn’t we give you that? We engaged, we argued, we looked things up in the encyclopedia because I was wrong and you were right and the only way we would ever know was with a heavy, leather-bound book, stuck in time. Even in your silence, you conferred more than I ever had, everything I missed. You brought loud, friendly voices, music videos that we laughed at, raucous records of bands I didn’t know. The house was full. Now it’s not. Now there is silence. That's all there is. Just silence.