Some Endings Don’t Announce Themselves

There’s a particular kind of quiet I didn’t have a word for until I lived through it: the quiet of doing something for the last time without knowing it’s the last time.

I think about a Sunday, months before everything changed, folding laundry on a bed that still had two names attached to it. Nothing was wrong that day. That’s the part I keep coming back to. No fight, no scene, nothing you could point to and say, there, that’s when it started ending. Just an ordinary Sunday, folding a shirt that wasn’t mine, half-listening to something on in the other room, feeling something I couldn’t name and didn’t examine because examining it felt like it might make it real.

I’ve talked to enough people since then to know this isn’t rare. Most endings don’t come with a soundtrack. They come disguised as ordinary Sundays, stacking up quietly for months before anyone’s willing to say the sentence out loud.

I wasn’t willing, for a long time. It’s strange what you can know and not know at the same time – carrying a truth around in your body for months before your mouth catches up to it. I look back now and I can see exactly when I started knowing. I can’t tell you when I started admitting it, because admitting it wasn’t a moment, it was a slow leak.

I’m not going to walk you through the whole thing today – some of it I’m still figuring out how to say, and some of it isn’t only mine to tell. But I wanted to write about this specific kind of quiet, because I think a lot of people are living inside it right now without a name for it either. The sense that something’s already ending, underneath a life that still looks, from the outside, like nothing’s wrong.

If that’s you: I see it. I’m not going to tell you what to do about it – I didn’t know what to do about mine for longer than I’d like to admit. I’ll just say that naming it, eventually, was the beginning of something, even though at the time it felt like the end of everything.

More of this story is coming. I’m telling it the way it actually happened – slowly, and mostly not in order – so if you want to follow along, that’s what the newsletter is for.

With Love, Wren

Read More