Silence · The Long Way Down to Morning · Pulse Beat
It is possible to live for eight months without music. She learned how. She learned which shops played it and avoided them. She learned that a bus can be a concert hall, a lift can be, a waiting…
It is possible to live for eight months without music.
She learned how. She learned which shops played it and avoided them. She learned that a bus can be a concert hall, a lift can be, a waiting room, and she learned to count backwards from a hundred when a melody found her. She stopped hearing it in her head, finally, as someone stops hearing a clock.
What she had not expected was how loud the silence was.
Without the six hours a day, there were six hours a day to fill, and she filled them with sleep, with television, with the long unlit afternoons of a city that does not care. She lost the habit of her own name. The postman called her Frau Rao and she thought, with detached interest, that he was speaking to someone else.
Her mother's calls went to voicemail and she listened to them in the evenings, one after another, and did not return them. Anika, are you eating. Anika, your cousin's wedding. Anika, please just send a message so I know. She meant to. She meant to the next day.