It's the silence.

KEVIN, 36

It's the silence that kills you. The deafening silence and an idle mind. Friends stop calling because they don't know what to say, and you don't know what to say either.  So you're glad they don't. Her parents don't know how to treat me, and mine are useless. My mother keeps sending me cards.  And I hear people, I hear people saying it because I'm sure I've said it. "At least they didn't have children".  Like that's better, like I can just wipe it away with no record. No one to be accountable to. We almost did, I guess it wasn't a kid really it was an almost. We had broken up for a year, got back together. We'd only been dating six months, and I was just about to take the bar, and she didn't know what to do with her life. We weren't really solid. We just weren't ready, it just wasn't- and I wouldn't have been a good dad, not then at least, but um "Thank God!" No one to explain this to. Not that I could explain it to anyone you know? People just look at you different. I have this buddy from grade school, who I haven't told, because he looks at me, how people looked at me from before. He looks at me like me. And when he asks how I'm doing, he's genuinely asking, not asking to make himself feel supportive. There's no congratulatory empathetic pause when he asks, he just asks, and if he listens for a response it's cause he chooses to.  I'll tell him eventually, when it comes up. But it's waking up at six in the morning with no shower running, no clothes left on the bathroom floor, no half drunken french press. No sounds of the clinking, the heels in the hall.  She liked the idea of a no shoes household but we never got there, she had to see how they looked, every morning. She could have worn them with the same outfit a million times but she had to see. Like it could change. So there was the clicking. She was small but loud, always listening to music, always humming, always moving.  Sometimes it annoyed me, she'd never stay put. But it's the silence that's what does it.