Quiet and silence are different shades of the same noiseless state. One denotes either a small or empty measure, the other complete absence. Stillness goes further: a type of quiet in which both sound and movement barely register – an all-absorbing blanket. For the last hour, it’s only the smallest repeat movements that have softly left and continue to softly leave their mark; outlines and impressions so fine and regular that they are no longer disruptions to the quiet, but are that quiet. From the armchair next to the window in Mum’s room, I watch yellow leaves drift soundlessly to the grass and tarmac below. The final rip of stalk from branch, its whistling descent, its crash landing to a floor of scattered relatives – all privately inaudible from this side of the glass. October is the most silent of all the months: the mid-point of autumn, between the heat and warmth of one season and the chill and fierce cold of another. I turn back to Mum, asleep now for several hours, and watch the tiny lift of her shoulder and waist, and a soft, almost imperceptible outward breath that registers every couple of seconds. In a laundry room down the hallway, a drum spins but finds its way here as only the very faintest of white noise. On the dresser, a carriage clock beats a constant subtle percussion: a noise to amplify the quiet, a second hand that will not rest. Though the ear finds one noise, the brain deceives with two; just tick, not tock, just a sound at one pitch, not two. The repeat rhythm is company. There is a shade of black fabric around the light above her bed and inside its cylindrical form sit two dozen strings of glass beads. Just the gentlest of breezes might push one into the side of another – threaten the quiet, the silence, the stillness – but that wayward wind is an idea that seems impossible within a room that all unprompted sound seems incapable of breaching. Stillness has a heaviness to it, objects fixed into position – a picture frame, a lamp, an over-bed table – each rooted and connecting with a surface and space to which it belongs, the only place it could be in these interventionless hours. Outside, in noiseless contrast, one gust after another rakes and tosses all of the yellow and brown. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes and several hours pass like this. When the hour hand reaches nine, I carefully pull the curtain towards me and the rings glide across the rail above. I take the unread book and the unworn glasses into the other room and swill the mug by the sink and turn the light off in the kitchen and then the lounge. I watch her from this opposite corner of the room for a while and it’s now only her shoulder that I can see rise and fall. I lean in and say goodnight to her, stroking her hair, her shoulder and then her hand with a touch lighter than any that ever caressed her two infant granddaughters. Silence follows me out of the door as I turn the key in the lock, take the stairs to the guest room, place bag and coat onto the table in the corner, pull the curtains on that same world as below of shaken yellow and brown, and lower myself onto the bed, not yet ready for letting go of that connecting tranquility that will be with her through until dawn.
‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.
"I lean in and say goodnight to her, stroking her hair, her shoulder and then her hand with a touch lighter than any that ever caressed her two infant granddaughters." The tenderness in this line just breaks my heart, Matt. Beautiful.
Stunning ❤️