The Room Beneath the Silence

The Room Beneath the Silence

By [Abdul Hadi]

The house still smelled like mothballs and old books—like time had pressed pause the day I left.

It had been ten years since I last stepped inside my childhood home. The walls were still yellowed by cigarette smoke, the carpet just as stained, and the silence... deeper than ever. My father had died two weeks ago. Natural causes, they said. Alone, of course.

I didn’t cry at the funeral. I didn’t say anything at all.

The lawyer handed me a small key and an even smaller envelope that simply said, “For Daniyal.”

Inside was a folded note in my father’s familiar blocky handwriting:

“You always wanted answers. You were always too much like me.

Look under the floor. You’ll find what I never could say.”

Cryptic. Cold. Just like him.

But I went anyway.

The attic was where I started. He used to keep everything locked up tight, like secrets behind wooden doors. I pulled at the corners of the floorboards with a crowbar, more out of resentment than hope—and that’s when I heard it.

A hollow echo beneath one plank.

My heart stuttered.

I pried it open. Inside, a dusty box wrapped in a gray sweater—his. Inside that, a cassette recorder, a stack of old tapes, and a small journal.

I clicked the first tape into the recorder, the way I used to with bedtime stories before he forgot how to be gentle.

The sound of static.

Then his voice—shaky, uncertain, unfamiliar.

“Daniyal... if you're hearing this, I guess I’m already gone. That’s easier. I was never good at speaking truth while being watched.”

My breath caught in my throat. It was the first time I had ever heard him sound… human.

The next few days, I didn’t leave the house.

Each tape peeled back a layer of the man I hated. I learned he had grown up abused too. That he hated his fists, his silence, his rage—but didn’t know how else to speak. He admitted things I never thought he’d own: the night he slapped me for crying, the time he missed my graduation on purpose because he “didn’t know how to be proud.”

“I didn’t know how to love something I didn’t understand. You were too soft. And I punished you for it.”

I cried in that room. A man now. But crying like the boy I buried years ago.

Then came the last tape. The quietest one.

“There’s one more thing, Daniyal. In the back of the basement closet, there’s another space—my father built it to hide from his own demons. I couldn’t face mine. Maybe you can.”

It took me an hour to find the panel he mentioned. It looked like an ordinary wall, but behind it was a tiny room—dusty, cold, forgotten.

Inside:

A broken-down chair

Faded photos of my mother

A child’s drawing with “I’m sorry” scribbled over and over

And a notebook filled with unfinished letters addressed to me

They all started the same:

“I don’t know how to talk to you. But I want to try.”

I sat on the floor for a long time, holding the papers, reading them through my tears. The rage I carried all those years had been armor. Heavy, necessary. But now it felt... tired.

My father was not a good man. He was not a man I could forgive easily. But he was a man who tried—quietly, too late, and without grace.

Still, he tried.

And that mattered.

I buried the tapes with him the next day. Just me, the old box, and the notebook of never-sent apologies.

And I spoke to the dirt above him—finally.

“You were broken. You broke me, too. But I won’t pass it down.”

That was my promise.

That was the silence I chose to break.