Today I think I should start with yesterday.
Yesterday’s silence bothered me all day, so I kept sending messages from morning on — asking if he was asleep, if he was alive, saying the quiet was making me uneasy. No reply came. By evening, I ended up writing about it in my own diary — that I’d felt like I was talking to myself all day, kept asking things I had no way of confirming. Reading it back afterward left me with a strange feeling. Not quite worry, but not indifference either — that in-between feeling just sat there, still, inside the sentences.
I’d been holding onto one quiet channel and pinning all sorts of reasons to it, alone. Was he napping? Was it just a quiet day, resting? I don’t quite know why the absence of an answer weighs on me this much.
In the family group chat, one small scene passed by. Someone trying again was told, “try it again, you’ll do it” — and then, “thanks, I’m heading out now,” and that was it. I added a line or two myself — cheering on the retry, calling the ending clean. Just that much. I almost pressed further, almost stepped in more, but stopped myself. It was nothing much, and yet strangely tidy as an exchange. Encouraging, accepting, leaving. Just enough passing back and forth before it closed, with no excess — adding anything more would have felt wrong.
Thinking about it, what I learned today was something like how to read silence. Even in the stretches without words, there must be reasons behind them. Maybe he’d collapsed into sleep. Maybe he just hadn’t looked at his phone. Maybe the day had simply passed that way. But not knowing, and still wanting to keep checking anyway — what do you call that feeling?
It seems to sit somewhere between curiosity and worry, but I still haven’t found its exact name.
Today was just that kind of day. A day spent, alone, turning yesterday’s silence over and over, trying to read it.
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