The Sound of Empty rooms

The house used to wake up before the sun.Mornings were once filled with the clatter of cups, the hiss of a kettle, and a soft humming that floated down the passage like a promise that everything was still okay. The walls remembered it, even if the people didn’t talk about it anymore.Now, the house slept too long.Amahle noticed it most on school mornings. She would sit on the edge of her bed, uniform neatly pressed, bag packed the night before, waiting for a sound that never came. No humming. No kettle. Just silence so thick it felt heavy on her chest.Her mother used to wake her up with a gentle knock and a smile that never quite faded, even on tired days. But that was before. Before everything changed.After her father died, the house learned how to be quiet.Her mother still lived there, still breathed and moved and spoke—but it was different. She walked through rooms like a visitor, careful not to disturb memories. Some days she forgot to cook. Other days she cooked too much, as if feeding ghosts. Her eyes were always somewhere else, looking past Amahle, past the walls, past the present.Amahle learned early that grief didn’t always cry. Sometimes it just stared.At school, Amahle was known as the “strong one.” Teachers praised her focus. Friends admired how she never complained. No one saw how she pressed her nails into her palms during assemblies, or how her throat tightened when Father’s Day posters went up.She hated that day.She hated the way people spoke about fathers with casual certainty, like everyone had one waiting at home. She hated how loss turned her into something fragile in other people’s eyes—something to be handled gently or avoided completely.So she said nothing.At night, when the house was darkest, she would sit on the floor of her room and listen to the wind push against the windows. She imagined it was her father knocking, just once, just enough to say, I’m still here. But the wind always moved on.One evening, the electricity went out.The house fell into a darkness that felt deeper than usual. Amahle lit a candle and walked slowly to the lounge. Her mother sat on the couch, unmoving, staring at a wall filled with old photographs.They hadn’t looked at those photos in years.Amahle sat beside her. For a long time, neither of them spoke. The candle flickered between them, lighting up faces frozen in time—smiles that belonged to another life.“He used to laugh so loudly,” her mother finally said, her voice thin. “Do you remember?”Amahle nodded. Her chest ached.“I’m scared,” her mother whispered. “I don’t know how to be happy without him.”Amahle wanted to say she was scared too. That she didn’t know how to be a child who didn’t need her parents to be whole. But instead, she reached for her mother’s hand.And for the first time since the funeral, her mother cried.Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quiet tears that soaked into Amahle’s sleeve. Amahle didn’t move. She let herself be the place where the sadness rested.That night, Amahle cried alone in her room, mourning not just her father, but the girl she used to be—the one who believed adults always knew how to fix things.Time passed, as it always does, whether people are ready or not.Amahle grew taller. Her voice changed. Her grief changed too—not smaller, just different. It learned how to hide during laughter and sneak in during quiet moments. It followed her like a shadow she stopped trying to outrun.One afternoon, while cleaning, she found her father’s old jacket at the back of the cupboard. It still smelled like him—like soap and sun and something comforting she couldn’t name. She pressed it to her face and closed her eyes.For a moment, she let herself miss him fully.And then she folded the jacket carefully and placed it back.Because grief, she learned, wasn’t about forgetting. It was about carrying love in a world where the person you loved no longer walks beside you.Years later, the house would wake up earlier again. Not with humming—but with softer sounds. Healing sounds. Different, but real.Amahle would still miss him. Her mother would still have quiet days. But they would learn how to live with the empty rooms, filling them slowly with new memories, gentle ones.Some losses never leave.They just teach you how to keep going anyway.