At first, silence is polite. It settles in like an old friend who doesn’t need to fill the space with words. It lets me move through the house unbothered, walking in and out of each room, touching objects just to remind myself they are still there.

But then, the silence begins to press in. Sitting heavy in the corners, in spaces where voices used to echo. It curls around the coach where laughter once spilled, then curls around me. The silence begins to stretch, growing larger than the rooms themselves. Pressing the corners, thick and unmoving. It filled spaces where voices once lived– where a laugh used to bounce off walls, where music spilled out of a cracked door, where a whispered conversation once curled beneath the glow of a bedside lamp. The silence is no longer an absence of sound–it is a presence, something vast and waiting.

I clear my throat, just to hear something. My voice sounds foreign, too loud in the quiet. I shift my weight, the floorboards creaking in response, but the moment I go still, the silence rushes back, swallowing the sound whole. I walk to the kitchen and turn on the faucet, letting water rush against steel. It gurgles down the drain, an interruption, a disturbance. But the moment I turn it off, the silence is there again, patient and endless.

I wonder if the house remembers. If walls can hold echoes the way lungs hold breath, if sound lingers long after it has faded. I imagine pressing my ear to the drywall, listening for the ghosts of conversations past. Would I hear them if I was quiet enough? The murmur of a bedtime story, the clatter of dishes, the distant hum of a song someone once loved but no longer plays?

I walk through the rooms, touching objects just to remind myself they are still here. The worn fabric of the couch, the cool glass of a picture frame, the ridges of a book's spine. These objects are waiting, too, untouched by the sound of living. The silence wraps around them like dust, settling in the spaces where movement used to be.

Outside, the world continues. A car door slams in the distance. A dog barks down the street. But here, the silence remains, patient and unbroken. It is not lonely, not exactly. It does not ask for company. It simply exists, filling every inch of space with things unseen– memories, ghosts, the echoes of what once was.

I sit on the cold floor, letting the quiet press against my skin. I close my eyes and listen. The silence listens back. And for the first time, I realize: silence is not empty. It is full. Full of everything that came before, and maybe, if I wait long enough, everything that will come after.