When I woke up, there was silence.

The apartment was quiet. It was only as I noticed the stillness in my home that I stretched out my senses beyond, listening further. No birds chirped outside my window. No cars honked angrily on the street. No trains roared by from the nearby train yard. It was not a silence of parts but that was how I perceived it at first. As I sat there alone in my apartment, alone in my world, the silence grew like a living thing expanding outward, until each scrap of quiet became a patch of a quilt that enveloped everything.

It was smothering.

I wanted to break it, to cry out and end that terrible silence but I was afraid. The silence was fragile like a delicate rose, made from layers of blown glass and I knew that if I did anything, it would shatter irrevocably. It wouldn’t take much, even a cough, and I alone would be responsible for the destruction of something unique and beautiful.

So I sat there on my bed, not moving, not even breathing, trapped in an unending moment of time.