Silent Conversation

I. THE THINGS WE SAY TO PHOTOGRAPHS

The photograph sits on the bookshelf like it always has, crooked in its frame, sun, faded at the corners, but defiant in its stillness. I don’t remember placing it there. Maybe Mom did, years ago. Maybe it simply appeared the way grief does, quietly, without asking.

Every morning, I talk to you.

At first, it was simple things. “Morning, Liam,” I’d mutter while pouring coffee. “Rain again.” Or “Can you believe Mom still makes toast like we’re kids?” Little fragments of life, flicked in your direction like folded notes. Useless without someone to open them.

Then, something shifted. Maybe it was the dream I had, the one where you stood at the edge of a frozen lake, saying nothing, just pointing toward the center where the ice thinned. Or maybe it was the letter I found in your drawer, never sent, addressed to someone named Cass.

Either way, I started saying more.

Now it’s different. Now I say things like:

“Why did we stop talking, really?”

“Were you scared that night?”

“I wish I had hugged you. One more time. Just… once.”

Mom doesn’t know. Or she pretends not to. She just sighs when she walks past my room and sees me facing the bookshelf like I’m meditating or praying. I guess in a way, I am. Prayer is just guilt with a rhythm, isn’t it?

You died on a Tuesday. That detail stays lodged in my chest like a shard of glass. I still remember how the day felt, thick with heat, the kind that makes shirts cling to your back and the air hum with the threat of thunderstorms. The call came at 3:27 p.m. I was in a meeting. Finance. Q3 projections. I remember the coffee in the paper cup more than the numbers. I remember not answering because I didn’t recognize the number.

Funny how fast the world rearranges itself in the space of one ignored call.

You died in a car wreck. Not drunk. Not texting. Not reckless. Just unlucky.

That’s the hardest part, Liam. If there had been a villain, a habit, a mistake, I could have clung to blame. Something to punch or curse or whisper about in the dark. But all I’m left with is silence. Yours, mostly.

II. WHAT REMAINS

I tried to tell myself it was random. That life doesn’t owe answers. But when someone dies, the echoes don’t fade, they get louder. Every silence becomes a question.

Like: Why were you even on that road?

Like: Where were you going?

Like: What if I’d called that morning? Would you have picked up?

I tried, at first, to go on like nothing had changed. I went back to work. I sent emails. I laughed at things that weren’t funny. But grief lives in the walls of routine. It leaks through the cracks.

One morning, I found myself brushing my teeth with your old playlist playing in the background. That dumb ska, punk band you loved in high school. I used to roll my eyes and say it sounded like a clown car crashing into a drum set. But there I was, brushing in rhythm. Crying.

I found your sketchbook last month. It was buried in the attic under a pile of coats that still smelled faintly of cedar and rain. You were better than you let on. The drawings weren’t just doodles. They were entire moods. A girl standing under a streetlight with hair like seaweed. A house half-sunken into earth. A crow with eyes too human.

On the last page, you drew us.

Two boys on a park bench. One with a soccer ball at his feet, the other with his hands clenched in his lap. Your handwriting beneath it: “He never asked, so I never told.”

I sat with that sentence for a long time. Ran my thumb over the indentation of your pen strokes like I was reading Braille for the first time.

Was that about me?

Or Dad?

Or someone else?

III. SPACES BETWEEN WORDS

Last week, I told you about Mom’s garden.

She still plants lilies like you’ll walk in one day and complain about the smell. I imagined your voice in my head “Those things smell like old lady perfume.” I even laughed when I said it aloud. I could see you there, hands stuffed in your hoodie pockets, that half-smile you wore when you were pretending not to care.

You were always pretending.

But then I asked something. Something I never got to when you were here.

“Were you happy, Liam?”

Silence.

I stared at your picture until my eyes burned, hoping the angle of your smirk would answer. Hoping I could read happiness in a single frame the way people claim you can hear the ocean in a shell. But all I saw was a boy pretending to be fine.

And I realized how many things we mistake for answers: a glance, a drawing, an old voicemail, a note scribbled in the corner of a page. We grasp at ghosts because they can’t push us away.

IV. THE THINGS WE DON’T SAY

This morning, I told you I hated you.

I said it fast, sharp, before I could regret it. I said it because you left. Because I have questions. Because I carry your absence like a second spine, rigid, aching, always there.

“I hate that you didn’t tell me,” I whispered. “That I have to guess. That I keep trying to find you in drawings and dreams.”

Then I sat down and cried until the room blurred and I tasted salt.

But afterward, after the ache passed through me like a fever, I said it softer.

“I miss you so damn much.”

V. THE BOY NAMED CASS

I met Cass today.

Turns out she wasn’t a girlfriend. Not even a girl.

Cass is short for Cassiel. He had soft hands and careful eyes, like someone who handled fragile things all day. He invited me into his small studio, walls lined with books and dried flowers and charcoal sketches pinned like butterflies to corkboards.

We didn’t shake hands. We just… looked at each other.

He told me you’d come over sometimes, just to draw and talk. You’d lie on the floor and sketch while he read aloud from novels, Rilke, mostly. That surprised me. You used to scoff at poetry.

“He said the poems gave him permission,” Cass said. “To feel more than he thought he should.”

I nodded. I wanted to ask more. I wanted to ask why you didn’t tell me about Cass, or about that night, or about the version of you I never got to meet. But I didn’t ask.

Because I was afraid of the answer.

“Did he ever talk about me?” I finally managed.

Cass looked at me like he was reading a book with the pages missing.

“Only when he missed you,” he said. “Which was often.”

I didn’t know what to say.

When I stood to leave, Cass said, “You know, he drew you. Over and over. You were always turning away in the pictures. But you were always there.”

That broke me in a way I didn’t expect.

VI. THE CANDLE AND THE WINDOW

Tonight I sat across from your photograph and whispered:

“I’m sorry.”

Sorry for all the times I mocked your clothes, your music, your moods. Sorry for thinking you were dramatic when you were just hurting. Sorry for not noticing that your silence was a scream I didn’t learn how to hear.

And sorry for not saying the one thing I thought you already knew.

“I love you.”

It felt strange to say it aloud. Like releasing a bird I didn’t know I was still holding. But it also felt… right.

Like maybe you heard me.

Like maybe you’d been listening all along.

VII. CONVERSATIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS

Tomorrow, I think I’ll move your photo.

Not to hide it. Not to bury it under books and receipts and life. But to place it beside the window, where the morning light hits softly. Where the shadows stretch long and slow and familiar. Maybe I’ll set a candle next to it. Not because I think you need the light. But because I do.

Maybe I won’t speak tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll just sit.

And listen.

And let the silence speak back.

Because I think that’s what grief really is.

Not forgetting. Not moving on. Not “healing” the way people like to say in pamphlets and quiet voices.

Just learning how to live with a conversation that never ends.

VIII. THE DREAM

Last night, I dreamed again.

You were on the back porch, barefoot, swinging gently on the old bench Dad installed the year before he left. You didn’t speak. You just looked at me like you were waiting. The wind touched the chimes overhead, and for a second, I thought you were going to laugh.

When I sat beside you, you passed me something, a small black notebook. Your sketchbook.

Inside, I expected drawings. I braced myself for it. But every page was blank. Every. Single. One.

I looked at you, confused.

You smiled that old crooked smile and said, “It’s yours now.”

When I woke up, my palms were damp, my chest hollow and full at once. I swear I smelled the cedarwood oil you used on your pencils. And somewhere deep in the hush of early morning, before Mom started her radio and before the world remembered to be noisy, I heard your voice, not loud, not clear, but there.

He never asked, so I never told.

Well.

I’m asking now, Liam.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re answering in the only way you can.

Through the quiet.

Through the drawings.

Through me.

I wrote this story for the silences we live with, the ones that follow us after loss, the ones that echo in our memories. Sometimes, we don’t realize how much someone meant until they’re gone. Sometimes, we only learn how to listen when the voice is no longer there. This story is my way of listening back.