Some Days, I Still Hear His Feet Running Down the Hall

There are mornings when the silence in this house is so complete, it feels almost violent.

It’s been nearly three years since Daniel died, and yet—some days—I still hear his feet running down the hall. Not in a haunted way, not in a ghost story sense. But like muscle memory—how your arms remember the weight of something long gone.

I’ll be making coffee, watching the light pour through the kitchen window, and suddenly, it’s there: that rapid, pattering thunder of bare feet against wood, his little gasping laugh chasing behind.

I used to hate that sound, if I’m being honest. It meant he’d snuck out of bed early. Again. It meant a whole morning of redirected emails, Cheerios spilled across the floor, and forgotten socks. Daniel had the boundless energy of a summer storm—chaotic, beautiful, and impossible to contain.

Now, I would give everything I own, everything I’ve become, just to hear that sound for real.

It was a Thursday when the call came. I remember because Thursdays were always Daniel’s favorite. “Almost Friday!” he’d shout before school, pumping his tiny fists in the air. But that Thursday, there was no fist pump. Just the quiet, sleepy kiss he planted on my cheek, and then the door swinging shut behind him as he ran to catch the bus.

It was a car accident. A teenage driver. A moment’s distraction. That’s all it took. The universe doesn’t ask for permission to ruin you.

The hours that followed—the hospital, the police, the white walls, the way the doctor wouldn’t meet my eyes—those have blurred into a haze of sound and color. But what I remember vividly is the sound of the nurse’s shoes squeaking as she walked away. It was the first time I noticed the silence in my life.

Grief is a shapeshifter. It changes form every day. Some days it’s loud and cruel—shoving photos into your hands, letting you remember everything just to take it all away again. Other days, it’s soft, a low ache, a hollowness in your chest that makes breathing feel like work.

Everyone grieves differently, they told me.

I grieved in silence. I stopped playing music in the house. I stopped baking his favorite banana bread. I even stopped using the hallway light he used to insist had to stay on all night. What was the point?

But the house didn’t agree with my silence. It kept whispering him back to me in small, terrible ways. I’d open the closet and find his little Spider-Man hoodie, still with his scent. I’d vacuum and find one of his toy blocks wedged under the couch. Once, I opened a book and a piece of construction paper fluttered out—his last drawing: a crooked rocket ship blasting off into a sky of yellow crayon stars.

And sometimes, the house would give me those phantom sounds. Running feet. A tiny giggle. The creak of his door. They never scared me. They hurt, but they didn’t scare me.

I started seeing a therapist after nearly a year. I didn’t go because I wanted to move on—I hated that phrase—I went because I was disappearing. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t living. And in one of our sessions, I finally said it out loud:

“I still hear him. I hear him running down the hall.”

My therapist didn’t flinch. She just asked, “Does it comfort you or scare you?”

“Both,” I said. “Mostly comfort. But it’s like… the comfort has teeth.”

It’s strange, the things you learn to live with. The spaces grief carves out in your life don’t stay empty. They become part of you, and eventually, they stop bleeding.

Now, I keep the hallway light on again. I bake the banana bread, not because he’ll eat it, but because I like the smell, and I imagine he would too. I even read his old favorite book out loud sometimes. Just to the walls. To the air. To whatever part of him still lingers here.

And when I hear the running feet again—always brief, always soft—I don’t cry like I used to.

I smile.

Because some days, in this quiet house, in this scarred but beating heart, I still hear my son. And in those moments, he's not gone. Not really.

He’s just around the corner, running down the hall.