Days go by and there is only the sound of her breath. 

 

This is not entirely true. Up on the sixth floor of this turn of the century building, the gas radiator creaks, the wind rushes, when she turns on the hot water in the morning, the gas pilot light in the bath closet explodes into action. A door in the hall outside opens or closes, it’s hard to tell if these are comings or goings. Sometimes, when the wind is strong, it’s as though it’s causing the radiator to click and creak its strange code. 

 

On her chest, there’s the new kitten silent and deep asleep. Sometimes, there’s a baby crying in the room next to her bedroom. Always, there’s her breath and inside there’s always dialogue, a miasmas of recriminations.

 

We withdraw because the world becomes too much to bear. This is not entirely true. We act out our inner disconnect. She thinks of the graveyard and of walking in it and listening. 

 

She thinks she must get onto that project soon, make it happen. But first, a cup of tea whose making will wake the silent kitten tucked into her t-shirt against her breast. 

 

Oh, and there is the sound of the keyboard as she makes thoughts appear on a screen: could one decipher it into actual spoken words – that click click – if one knew the exact spatial configuration, the tenor of each click. Then she could hear herself think instead of watching. 

 

If she could hear herself think in this way, what would that voice sound like? The voices in her head do not sound like the ones she uses to speak, surely. They are not the same at all. 

 

What she speaks in her head is not rehearsed in actual out loud words beforehand. It’s a kind of sing song for one thing and who knows if the words are actually sounding the same as the ones she hears inside as they are not articulated, but only thought, only an ephemeral other. They are not words at all. They do not sound out loud. 

 

She’s feeling herself heavy in the world. She’s often this but today more so. She’s going to get up now and walk across the bedroom into the kitchen to make that cup of tea. 

 

The kitten will wake and mew. Her slippers will slap the wood floor and then the rug and then more wood. She’ll turn on the water to fill the kettle – hot water because the cold is too slow – and the pilot will blast into action in another room. 

 

The kettle will boil quickly and then click when it’s finished. She’ll take a teabag from the box, put it into a cup and pour the water. The fridge door will open for the carton of milk, which will pour into her cup. 

 

She won’t mix it with a spoon. She’ll squeeze the teabag with hot fingertips and silently set it in the top of a jam jar for another later cup of tea – although she rarely re-uses these teabags. When there are many of them, she’ll open the cupboard under the sink and toss them – although she has no bag in the garbage container so it’ll have to wait. 

 

She’ll get up now…so listen. But it isn’t entirely like that. The chair groaned as it swung around. The cat dropped on the floor and mewed for food. She opened a package and went to sit by the window with her tea. 

 

It wasn’t how she imagined it, it was so much more. It was the meticulous sound of the real.