You are not alone, for I am fluent in the silence of the floor, and I lie there beside you in your times of dark.
Grief does not rage. It does not thrash or claw or demand to be heard. It is not the violence of shattered glass or the fury of slamming doors. That's anger. Grief is slow. Heavy. A drowning weight that settles into your bones, pressing you deeper into the earth, until you are nothing but a hollowed-out vessel, listening to the world move on without you.
You have not moved in five days. The bedroom floor has become your grave, the ceiling your sky. The air around you is claustrophobic, stagnant, as if time itself has congealed. Your body is stiff, curling in on itself like something decaying, though you are still here, still breathing - although you do not wish to be.
The house groans around you, its sounds distant, warped, like echoes from another life. The fridge screams in the kitchen, mechanical and unfeeling. A dog barks outside, muffled as if through layers of gauze. Cars pass in the distance, their tires whispering against the pavement, carrying strangers to places that do not matter. Not anymore.
The pipes in the walls clank: water rushing through veins that are not yours. The wind presses its hollow mouth against the window, a long, low howl that stretches into the night. Rain follows, tapping against the glass in an empty rhythm. A soft knocking, a plea: please get up. But you do not answer. You cannot.
The jug shrieks in the kitchen, a high, piercing wail. It should be turned off. Someone should move, should silence it. But no one does. It screams and screams, its agony filling the house, filling you, until it stops. The sudden absence is deafening. The silence rushes back in, heavier than before, swallowing everything whole.
Your phone vibrates on the nightstand, a dull, insect-like buzz. A message. A call. A voice, reaching into the abyss. It dies unanswered.
The clock ticks. A slow, torturous metronome, marking the hours you no longer feel. Morning swallows night, night swallows morning, an endless cycle of nothing. The sun rises and sets, unseen. The world turns. But you do not. You remain still, trapped in the rotting carcass of grief, waiting for something, anything, to make you move again.
And then, in the hollow dark, something shifts. The house exhales. The wind sighs. The rain softens. Somewhere, far away, a bird sings. A small, fragile sound, fragile as the breath still dragging itself from your lungs. You do not move. Not yet. But the silence has changed. And though it is still heavy, still endless, realizing that maybe not today, but one day, you will rise again.
One day, you will rise from this suffocating catatonic silence, from the weight of this darkness. The floor that has held you captive will no longer bind you. You will reclaim your light, even if it feels like it has been buried beneath the rubble of your grief. You will stand, frightened, but resolute, like a crow soaring through the burning remains of a city: its wings beating against the ashes of the past, scattering seeds of defiance, of hope, of rage. You will plant them in the cracks, and from those cracks, life will push through, fragile but unstoppable. You will reclaim the voice that once was stifled, the fire that once flickered, and rise from the silence of the floor.
You are not alone, for I am fluent in the silence of the floor, and I lie there beside you in your times of dark.
