The Silence Between Seconds

There are moments in life that stretch longer than they should. Not because time changes—but because you do. Those are the moments when you hear the silence between seconds. When you pause just long enough to realize everything is moving forward without you.

The day my father died, time didn't stop. I remember that because I expected it to. I thought the world would acknowledge my grief—maybe the sky would dim, or the wind would hush in mourning. But nothing happened. The clock in the hallway ticked on. My phone buzzed with notifications. A neighbor honked their horn.

I stood in the kitchen holding the phone that delivered the news, and for a second, I felt like I had stepped out of reality. Like I was a spectator in my own life. Everyone else kept walking, talking, laughing. But I… I had entered the space between seconds.

Grief does that to you. It’s not always the loud crying or the public mourning. Sometimes it’s sitting still in a quiet room, staring at a wall, and realizing the world is louder than your thoughts. That silence—heavy, endless, sharp—is the space where pain lives.

After the funeral, people brought casseroles and shared old stories. They meant well. Some of them even cried, and I appreciated their emotion. But no one talked about the stillness. No one talked about what it meant to listen to absence.

My father used to say I was “too much in my head.” Maybe I was. I’d always been a thinker. I’d read books instead of playing outside, asked questions no one wanted to answer, and found comfort in solitude. He didn’t understand me, not really. But he respected the parts he couldn’t reach.

He would sit in his old chair, sipping coffee, while I read on the floor near him. We didn’t speak much in those moments. We didn’t need to. That was our language—the silence between seconds. I didn’t realize until much later that those were some of the loudest conversations we ever had.

When he was gone, I started waking up at 2:17 AM. Every night. No sound, no reason. Just… awake. At first, I thought it was my body grieving. Then I wondered if it was something else. Maybe the universe trying to whisper what words couldn’t.

So I started listening.

I’d sit by the window, staring at the stillness of the street, and just breathe. I wouldn’t scroll my phone. I wouldn’t write. I would just… be. And in that space, I started to hear things I never had before—the way the refrigerator hums like a lullaby, how distant trains seem like ghosts passing through cities of sleep, and how even the darkness has texture.

It was during one of those 2:17 vigils that I remembered something my father once said:

"The spaces between things matter as much as the things themselves."

Back then, I thought he meant the silence in music, or the white space in a painting. But now, I understand. He was talking about life. The pauses between achievements. The breaths between heartbreak and healing. The seconds that pass unnoticed but hold the weight of entire emotions.

It’s been six months now.

I still wake up sometimes at 2:17 AM. Not every night. But enough to remind me. And when I do, I don’t panic. I don’t cry. I just sit. I listen. I exist in that fragile space where time seems to wait for you to catch up.

That’s what I’ve learned. Life doesn’t stop for pain—but you can. You can stop and feel it. Acknowledge it. Sit with it. And then, slowly, you can begin again.

Because healing doesn’t happen in the big moments. It happens in the quiet ones. The ones that don’t get posted, don’t get praised. The ones that live in the silence between seconds.

And now, finally, I’ve learned to live there too.