CHAPTER 8
1186 Words
Day One of Silence
Eli wakes up at 6:48 a.m. to an empty inbox and the worst kind of quiet.
The apartment is the same as always (same cracked ceiling, same leaning tower of Lena’s abandoned hoodies in the armchair), but the silence has weight now. It presses against his eardrums like water pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling and waits for the familiar buzz of a good-morning meme, a voice note of her yawning, anything.
Nothing comes.
He almost texts her three separate times before eight-thirty.
At 8:31 he throws his phone across the room so hard it leaves a dent in the drywall.
He showers until the hot water runs out.
He scrubs his skin raw trying to wash off the memory of her curled against him on the couch twenty-four hours ago, her hair damp from crying, her fingers clutching his shirt like he was the only solid thing left in the world.
The water goes cold and he stays under it anyway, teeth chattering, because pain is at least something he recognises.
He dresses like a man dressing for his own funeral (dark jeans, the black hoodie she once said made him look “dangerous in a quiet way”).
He leaves the apartment without breakfast because food feels obscene today.
The city is loud in all the ways it never was when she was one text away.
On the subway a girl drops her coffee and starts crying.
Eli almost reaches for his phone to send Lena a voice note (she hates when people cry in public, always wants to fix it).
His hand is halfway to his pocket before he remembers he’s not allowed to do that anymore.
He stands there frozen while the girl wipes her eyes and the train lurches forward and nobody saves her.
At work he sits at his desk and opens the same file he’s been “working” on for three days.
His boss walks by and asks if he’s okay.
Eli realises he’s been staring at a blank artboard for forty-seven minutes.
He says yes.
His voice sounds like someone else’s.
At 12:07 p.m. he caves and opens their chat.
The last message is still his from yesterday:
2:14 a.m. is officially retired.
The little “delivered” sits underneath it like a tombstone.
He types:
I lasted four hours before I almost broke the rules.
Deletes it.
Types:
I hate this.
Deletes it.
Types:
Are you okay?
His thumb hovers so long the screen dims.
He locks the phone and shoves it into the drawer face-down.
Across the river, Lena is having her own private apocalypse.
She wakes up on the couch where he left her, his scent still clinging to the cushions.
The hoodie she’s wearing (his navy one with the frayed drawstrings) smells like him and her tears and the particular kind of safety she just outlawed.
She makes coffee with shaking hands and spills half of it on the counter because she keeps looking at her phone expecting it to light up with his name.
It doesn’t.
She opens the chat twelve times before noon.
Reads his last message until the words lose meaning.
Types:
I miss you so much it feels like I’m drowning.
Deletes it.
Types:
I was wrong. Come back.
Deletes it.
Types:
I’m proud of us for trying.
She stares at that one the longest.
Finally sends nothing.
She calls in sick to work.
Spends the day pacing the five hundred square feet of her apartment like a caged thing.
She rearranges books on shelves she doesn’t care about.
She deletes Marcus’s number with shaking fingers even though he never did anything wrong.
She opens the fridge, closes it, opens it again.
Nothing looks edible.
At 2:14 p.m. (exactly twelve hours since the silence began) she sits on the kitchen floor and cries so hard she throws up in the sink.
Maya texts her at 4:51 p.m.:
drinks tonight? we need to celebrate your freedom from mediocre finance bros 😉
Lena stares at the message until the words blur.
She wants to tell Maya everything (how she’s not free, how she’s in prison, how the bars are made of her own cowardice).
Instead she replies:
rain check. not feeling great.
Maya’s reply is instant:
say less. soup delivery incoming.
Lena panics and types:
please don’t come over. just need to be alone tonight.
She watches the typing bubbles appear, disappear, appear again.
Finally:
okay babe. text if you change your mind ❤️
Lena throws her phone onto the couch like it’s radioactive and curls into a ball on the floor.
Night falls.
Eli walks home through streets that feel hostile now.
Every couple holding hands is a personal attack.
Every laugh from a bar patio sounds like mockery.
He stops at the bodega on the corner and buys a six-pack and a bag of gummy worms because they were her favourite and he’s clearly a masochist.
Back in his apartment he drinks two beers standing at the sink.
The third he uses to wash down three melatonin because if he doesn’t knock himself out he’ll do something stupid like show up at her door at 2 a.m. begging.
He lies on the couch (the same couch where he held her two nights ago) and stares at the ceiling some more.
At 11:47 p.m. he opens the unsent voice note folder.
There are now fifty-two drafts.
He records a new one, voice thick with beer and grief:
“I lasted one day. One f*****g day and I’m already losing my mind. I keep waiting for the part where this gets easier and it never comes. I hate that you were right. I hate that I still love you more than I hate this.”
He saves it.
Doesn’t send it.
At 2:13 a.m. he sits up straight, chest tight, muscle memory screaming that in sixty seconds his phone should light up with her name.
2:14 a.m. arrives with the precision of a guillotine.
The screen stays dark.
For the first time in eight years, there is no text, no call, no breathing on the other end of the line.
Eli puts his head in his hands and cries the way men cry when they finally understand what alone actually feels like.
Across the river, Lena is awake too.
She has her phone in her lap, screen brightness turned all the way down, staring at the blank chat like if she looks hard enough his name will appear.
2:14 comes and goes.
She whispers into the dark, “I’m still here.”
Nobody answers.
She pulls his hoodie tighter around her shoulders, buries her face in the sleeve that still smells like him, and lets the silence swallow her whole.
Day one of silence ends exactly the way it began:
two people in separate boroughs, learning how loud emptiness can be when the person you love most is finally, officially, gone.
Tomorrow will be worse.
End of chapter eight.
The quiet has teeth now.
- Writer
