A Certain Kind of Quiet
A short story
I’m standing in front of the window, and everything is too still. It’s the kind of stillness that gets under your skin, seeps into your bones. No cars. No people. Even the trees outside have taken on this eerie quality, frozen in mid-sway as if someone pressed pause on the world. My fingers twitch, cigarette between them, but I don’t light it. It feels wrong, somehow, to disturb the quiet.
“Are you gonna do it or just stare at it?”
Her voice, sharp, breaks the silence. Emily. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed like she’s waiting for something. Maybe she is. I’ve never been able to figure her out, not fully. There’s always this…gap, like she’s there but not quite there. Some part of her is always one step ahead, living in a future moment that hasn’t happened yet. Or maybe it’s me stuck in the past. I don’t know.
“Do what?” I ask, my voice sounding flatter than I intended. I turn to look at her, and she meets my eyes, but only for a second before looking away, back to her phone, fingers scrolling over the screen. Always something to distract her.
“You know what.” Her voice is bored. Detached. Like we’re having a conversation about the weather or the price of eggs.
I don’t say anything, just drag the cigarette across my lips, not lighting it, just feeling it there. The weight of it. That strange comfort of holding something that’s bad for you. It feels safe.
The day we moved in together, there were boxes everywhere. We were still fresh, still full of those ridiculous little hopes that fill up the early days of living with someone. We thought things like matching dishes and a bookshelf made of real wood were the signs we had it together. We thought we were different. Not like the other people. Not like our parents.
“It’ll be different with us.”
Emily had said that with so much conviction, eyes wide, as she unpacked her books. The sound of her voice, so sure, made me want to believe it. Made me want to believe that we could dodge all the bullets and somehow be the exception.
“Different how?”
I never asked, but I wonder if she would have had an answer back then. Or maybe she didn’t need one. She was always good at selling me on the idea of things, even when the reality of those things was paper-thin. It’s how we’ve made it this far, I think. The sheer momentum of those early days.
I look at her now, across the room, and there’s that gap again. The distance. It’s like I’m watching someone else live her life, someone who looks like Emily but isn’t really her anymore. Maybe I’m not me either. Maybe we’ve both changed so slowly that we didn’t even notice until the space between us became something we couldn’t bridge.
“You didn’t answer me,” she says without looking up, tapping her phone screen like it’s the most important thing in the world.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. I know exactly what she means, but I can’t say it. The words are too sharp, too real, and if I say them out loud, they’ll cut everything to shreds. So I don’t. I swallow them down, bury them deep where they can’t hurt us.
There was a moment, maybe a week ago, where everything felt like it was slipping, but I told myself it wasn’t. Told myself it was just a rough patch. People go through those, right? It doesn’t mean everything’s falling apart. But then I saw the look in her eyes, and I knew. I knew we weren’t people who went through rough patches. We were people who stood on opposite sides of a chasm, looking down into the abyss, pretending it wasn’t there.
There’s a knock on the door. We both freeze.
“Are you expecting someone?” I ask, but she shakes her head. Her eyes are wide now, and there’s a tension in the air, something that wasn’t there before. Something fragile.
“Don’t answer it,” she says, and there’s fear in her voice that unsettles me. Emily is never afraid of anything. Or at least she pretends not to be.
I walk toward the door, but the knock comes again, louder this time. More insistent.
The night before, we had gone to bed angry. She turned her back to me, and I stared at the ceiling, wondering how we got here. Wondering why it was so damn hard to just talk to her. The words always felt stuck, like they didn’t belong in my mouth, like I was trying to speak a language I didn’t know.
“You never tell me what you’re thinking,” she had said earlier, her voice thin and tired, like she’d been holding onto that sentence for months, maybe longer.
But how could I explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her, it was that I didn’t know how? Everything inside felt jumbled, a mess of half-formed thoughts and emotions that I couldn’t make sense of, let alone articulate. So I stayed silent. And she did too.
I open the door.
The figure standing there is familiar in the way that something out of a dream is familiar. Like I know them, but I don’t know how. A man, about my age, maybe younger. He looks at me with eyes that seem too calm for the situation.
“What do you want?” I ask, my voice sharp, defensive.
“I’m here for her,” he says, nodding toward Emily, who is now standing in the doorway behind me, her face pale, eyes wide with something that looks a lot like recognition.
“What the hell is going on?” I turn to her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at him.
“It’s okay,” she says softly, stepping past me. Her voice is different now, softer, like the Emily I knew before everything got complicated. Before the distance. Before the silence.
She walks toward him, and they exchange a look, one that makes me feel like I’ve been erased, like I don’t exist in this moment.
“Emily?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she steps outside, and I watch her leave with him. No explanation. No fight. Nothing. Just the quiet click of the door as it closes behind them.
I sit at the kitchen table, staring at the empty chair across from me. I light the cigarette that’s been dangling from my fingers for the last hour and inhale deeply. The smoke fills my lungs, burns, but it’s the kind of burn that feels good, the kind that reminds me I’m still here, still alive.
But it’s quiet now. A certain kind of quiet. Not the stillness from before, not the eerie, frozen kind. No, this is different. This is the quiet that comes after something ends. The quiet that wraps itself around you like a blanket and makes you wonder if you imagined the noise to begin with.
I think back to when we first met. We were in a bookstore, one of those cramped, dimly lit places where you have to squeeze past people just to get to the shelf you want. She was standing in front of the philosophy section, her head tilted to the side, reading the back of some paperback. I didn’t think much of it at the time, just another girl in a bookstore. But then she looked up, and our eyes met, and for a second, it felt like everything clicked into place.
“You read philosophy?” I asked, trying to sound casual, even though my heart was pounding in my chest.
“Sometimes,” she said, and there was this half-smile on her face, like she knew something I didn’t. That was the first time I noticed the gap.
It was there all along, wasn’t it? This distance. This space between us. I just didn’t want to see it. I told myself that the silences were comfortable, that the lack of conversation was just two people who didn’t need to fill the air with meaningless words. But that’s not true. Silence like that isn’t comforting. It’s suffocating. It’s the kind of silence that eats away at you, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left but the emptiness.
I don’t know how long I sit there, staring at the empty chair, the cigarette burning down to the filter. There’s an ache in my chest, not sharp, not painful, just…heavy. Like something inside me has shifted, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to shift it back.
The next day, I wake up to an empty apartment. No note. No text. Nothing.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell myself. “It’s just a rough patch.”
But I know better. I know that this isn’t something you come back from. This is the kind of ending that doesn’t give you closure, doesn’t give you answers. It just…ends. And you’re left with the quiet.
I move through the day in a haze, going through the motions of living but not really feeling any of it. Coffee tastes like ash. The sunlight feels too bright. Everything is too loud and too quiet at the same time. I can’t explain it, but I’m not sure I need to.
Later, when I sit down on the couch, staring at the TV but not really watching it, I realize something. The distance wasn’t just between us. It was in me. It’s always been there, this gap, this space between what I want to say and what I can say. Between who I am and who I think I am. Between the person I want to be and the person I’ve been pretending to be for so long that I’ve lost track of which is which.
The quiet settles in around me again, but this time it feels different. It’s not suffocating. It’s not eerie. It’s just…quiet.
And maybe that’s okay.
I stub out the cigarette, watching the embers fade, and I think to myself, This is it, isn’t it?
This is the moment I let go.
And in the quiet, I feel something shift again. Something lighter this time. Something real.
