Silence Broken

I sat cross-legged on the battered pull out couch in our living room. Pillows and blankets lay strewn around me like bodies scattered in a battlefield, but I couldn't bring myself to expel the tiniest bit of energy to pick them up. The sound of traffic outside was dulled, and I could feel the afternoon sun filtering in through the window and trying to break in through my back, but it bought me no warmth.

The house was quiet now. A delicate silence lay over everything like a thick smog that suffocated any sign of life it might find. I could hear my heart beat on as each second crawled past, yet time seemed to blur into one agonizing lump that formed in my throat and choked my breathing.

I hadn't spoken since that phone call from the hospital. As soon as the ringtone called out across our barren apartment, I knew he was gone.

And it had all happened so fast. We never expected to end this way. We were going to move out of the city, get married and eventually adopt kids. He wanted to play music for the rest of his life, and I wanted to be with him for the rest of mine. Those were plans that would now lay discarded forever, they had slipped through my hands like sand and there was no way I could bring any of it back.

The last time I had seen his face in person was three weeks before he died, and he had died alone, without a hand to hold, without even a funeral to mark his parting.

He had lived all his life in such vibrant light and colour, and now he passed on without notice or sound.

Silence had turned our beautiful, beautiful home into a museum filled with relics that once belonged to two happy people. All I could do was wander through the places we used to be and try to remember. I wanted to commit everything about him to my memory before it faded away.

My hands played over the cold, steel harmonica I had been holding for I don't know how long. When I had first seen it lying out on the counter, I couldn't bring myself to look at it, let alone touch it. I had never been able to play music. It had always been his job to fill the silences, and now that he was gone they were perpetual. He had told me once that the reason he liked to play music, was because it was a rare universal language. Across all creeds, cultures and religion, there were always musicians and those who liked to dance. And he was good at it, damn good. He had so much life left inside of him, if he had only been allowed to live it.

I stared down at his harmonica and felt that lump in my throat begin to form again.

It was so aggressive with it's silence, I wanted to scream at it and say "he's not here to play you anymore, you have to make your own noise now! That's your job! don't you dare be quiet like me".

But I didn't. Maybe because every time I thought about getting angry, or about cursing the universe for how it wasn't fair, I saw his face in my minds eye, and all anger bled away. I saw his face, filling this very same harmonica with such a deep noise. I saw his face, thrown back in laughter with those gorgeous curls that tumbled down across his forehead and made him look oh so innocent.

There was nothing angry about him while he lived, I wouldn't taint his death by turning bitter. I couldn't do that to him.

Instead, it was easier to simply sit in this stagnant silence and wait. Wait for what, I had no idea. But I knew that something had to happen soon, I couldn't live like this for much longer.

Storms blew themselves out eventually, I knew that. That was what everyone kept messaging and calling me to say. But none of them understood, and I couldn't make them understand how deeply this silence had rooted in me.

Every second I spent curled up inside my own mind I began to feel myself fossilize. Slowly, piece by piece, I was fading away. Soon all that would be left of me was a silent, ghostly form that would roam this apartment, not bright enough to stay alive but not dark enough to die.

But surely that cold, marble heart of a ghost was preferable to the bleeding, aching heart of a lover left behind? There was nothing left for me here. Every thought that crossed my mind bought with it a new twisting agony in my chest that I couldn't fight or prevent. There was nothing left for me here. No possible reason for me to be down here while he was up there.

The harmonica burned a hole in my hand.

I held it tightly. The cold metal turned warm in my grasp, my last anchor to the world we built together. My last anchor to him.

Don't you dare be quiet like me.

I put the instrument to my mouth, just as I'd seen him play so many times before, and I swear I could almost taste his lips. My breath hitched in my throat and suddenly I felt the prick of tears behind my eyelids, but I forced them back.

The note came out twisted and sharp, but the silence had been broken, and while I could play no music, the simple noise was the sweetest I had ever heard.

It was just one note. One breath was all it took to break the curse around me, so I played another one.

I saw him in front of me again. With the window open, playing his sweet harmonies that caught in the breeze and drifted down to the passerby's below. And I could feel him watching from the somewhere he was now, and I heard him say,

I am not here to play anymore, do not let me go silent.

So I played on.