Silence Rumbles Like Thunder

It’s hard to be in the quiet. Suddenly, it’s the unknown.

Distraction has been my preference for quite some time now.

Those quiet moments, I used to long for. Now they are themselves disturbing distractions.

I watch the reels. Reel after reel. Swipe up again to feel something.

A person has saved a little girl. I feel that.

A woman announces she is pregnant after a long fertility struggle. I feel that.

The silly and the strong. I look for them all.

Then, one comes along that is grief related. Oh, you algorithm. I don’t like the grief ones. But it captures how I feel. It puts into words what my brain can’t yet seem to comprehend. That you’re gone and that I miss you. That there’s an unfillable hole in my heart. My heart physically pangs day after day missing you, Bucky.

There are no reels that will help me with my daughter’s death however.

This was a very unique situation. It hurts to think about. It’s cloudy and misty and grey.

I have flashbacks of the moment I gave birth to her all the time. I see her little body in my mind. The look in Sarah, our nurse’s eyes. Nothing prepares you for saying goodbye before you’ve even said hello. The dreams popped like a balloon. Cancelled plans. Deleting “baby shower” from my calendar. Emails from my registry telling me there’s been a price change on the bassinet she will never use. Packing away the baby clothes. But most of all, the pain of realizing that I will not know her in this lifetime.

There is now a bridge that I’m on. It’s connecting my life before and my life to come. I don’t know how long it is. So far I’ve walked miles. Every once in a while, I pass by a stranger. We nod in acknowledgement that neither of us wanted to be here. Sometimes I think about jumping in the water but if only to go for a swim. So far, that isn’t an option. I continue to walk this dusty road in solitude, in silence.

If you ask me about what happened, I will tell you every detail. I can tell it like a story that’s happened to someone else. I don’t want to know that it’s secretly happened to me. Because that would be too much for one person, certainly, right? I add up in my head like a math equation whether a person can be normal after so much loss. Turns out I can’t, and that’s ok. I no longer wish to be normal. When you’ve been cut to the quick all that’s left is unabashed truth. And I think that’s what we truly long for.

But, I can’t keep filling up the silence with the noise, the unnecessary screen time that slowly decays my sharpness of mind.

So I sit in the silence.

It’s uncomfortable at first. But then I hear something, I can’t let it get away.

It’s so quiet, yet it rumbles like thunder.