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Found this in our notes, written last Thursday, hopefully it’s okay to share – not sure who wrote it.

Kate

It’s too quiet.

The atmosphere is heavy like everyone had an argument and just gave up and left.

I have music playing to try and fill the air, block out the nothing, it’s not the same thing. Usually even if they aren’t talking, they always ‘feel’ close.

Now they feel unconscious.

A Nothing slowly encompasses the everything like fog creeping in and blanketing a once familiar landscape making it unrecognisable, it’s eerie.

There’s a line in a song that’s playing “sometimes silence is violent” I relate to that right now.

Everything seems surreal in a different way to derealisation, different from dissociation. The terms I know don’t fit, there’s a clear difference but somehow boldly irrelevant. Maybe it’s loneliness.

My eyes are stinging, I assume burned from a combination of exhaustion and tears I didn’t cry for a grief that is not mine to bear, I feel fatigued to my bones yet I can’t sleep for the quiet. My jaw keeps clenching tight, I am repeatedly sticking my tongue between my teeth to try and ease the pressure and every time I do it clicks and twangs as though it might just give up for good and I’m briefly compelled to imagine sipping meals through a straw for the rest of my days.

I know why they’re gone right now, I know what happened today. I’m not missing the information or the narrative it’s a story that’s ours but not mine, a tale heard but not quite remembered. I looked on our phone at the photographs of ‘the perfect day’ before life swooped back in and blindsided them.

I’m separated from it, all of it, the pretty gardens, the creepy antique store, the moment the world stopped for one person but kept on turning for everyone else. I see the photographs but I can’t feel them.

Sometimes it’s so hard, so contradictory. I know I am compartmentalised yet I am always me, I only know the world through my eyes and through the stories of others. But they seem to also be ‘me’, they claim to be both me and them, a confusing dichotomy of emotionless emotions which I think I have understood the technicalities of previously yet I can’t quite grasp it or hold it right now because I am acutely aware they are me yet I am not them.

I feel like a reflection of a now silent void, just reserving a place in time.