Things I Did Not Say

I was nine the first time I learned that a house can be quiet on purpose.

My father did not shout. I want to be clear about that, because for a long time I thought that meant nothing had happened. He went to work. He came home. He read the paper at the kitchen table with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, and when I walked into the room he would look up and then look back down, as if I were a draught from the window.

The sentence

There is a sentence I have carried for most of my life. I could say it in my sleep, and sometimes I do.

You could have asked me how I was.

I never said it. Not that summer, not at his funeral, not in the seven years after that when I still had questions I could have asked him. I think I believed that if I kept the sentence inside, it would stay small.

It did not stay small. It grew into the way I apologise for things that are not my fault, the way I check a room for exits, and the way I go quiet when someone I love starts to raise their voice.

Silence is not the same as peace. Sometimes it is just the sound of a child who has stopped expecting an answer.

What I am saying now

I am not writing this to blame him. He is not here to answer, and I am no longer sure I want an answer. What I want is smaller and harder: to say the thing out loud, once, to someone who can read it.

Some of it may sound like a complaint. Most of it is grief, and it has taken me a long time to tell those two things apart.

This is a fictional demo story. Its characters and events are invented.