The Silence Between Songs

The apartment was quiet. Not the kind of quiet you notice immediately — not an absence, but a stillness. The kind that lingers in doorways and clings to the corners of ceilings. I hadn’t played music in two days. Not even a podcast. Not even the soft hum of a lo-fi playlist on repeat.

Just me. And that silence.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I couldn’t go a minute without something filling the air — something to distract me from my own thoughts. Songs looped through headphones until the lyrics became muscle memory. Background chatter from YouTube videos I never really watched. Anything, everything, to avoid being alone with myself.

That changed slowly, without announcement. Like most healing does. You never wake up one day and say, “I’m better now.” You notice you haven’t cried in a week. You realize your coffee doesn’t taste like sadness. You stop checking your phone after sending a text.

I had moved in a month ago. A second-story walk-up, south-facing window, crooked light switch in the hallway. No furniture except a mattress on the floor and a secondhand table I painted blue. I wanted to start over — and for once, I didn’t want to drag the old noise with me.

So I sat in the silence. At first, it hurt. I kept expecting it to crack open and reveal something awful: regret, guilt, a hundred conversations I’d never have. But it didn’t. It just... waited.

On the third day, I opened the window.

Outside, someone was practicing piano in the apartment next door. Not well — the notes staggered, missed, backtracked. But there was something honest in it. A kind of effort that made me smile. I sat by the window and listened. No lyrics, no story, just sound — simple and raw.

It reminded me of my father.

When I was a kid, he used to play the same Elton John song every Sunday morning. “Tiny Dancer.” He’d sing along off-key, toast burning in the background, the dog howling like it was in pain. I hated it at the time. But now? I’d give anything to hear that awful cover again.

Maybe that’s the thing about silence — it lets memory breathe.

That night, I made tea and sat cross-legged on the mattress. No music. Just the tick of the clock and the occasional creak of old pipes. I thought of my mother’s hands, folding laundry. I thought of the road trip I never took. Of the friend I let slip away because I didn’t know how to say I needed her.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel broken. Just... full. Like all those things I’d buried finally had room to exist without consuming me.

When I finally did play a song — a soft acoustic track I used to listen to on the bus in college — it didn’t feel like armor. It felt like warmth. Like an old friend knocking gently on the door. I let it in. But only for a moment.

I think I finally understood something that used to scare me: silence isn’t empty. It’s sacred. It’s the space where the real stuff lives. The bruises. The longing. The quiet, small joys. The parts of yourself you forget until everything else goes quiet.

Now, I don’t run from it.

Sometimes I still fill the air with old songs. I sing along to bad 90s ballads while washing dishes. I dance alone in the kitchen to the same four tracks I’ve always loved. But some nights, I turn everything off. I sit with a cup of tea. I breathe.

And I let the silence sing back.