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*Learning the silence–1
Learning the silence–1
(Isla)
+25 Pointd
Sera left me alone just before midnight.
She had spent the better part of the evening showing me things. The phone and how to turn it on
and what the basic functions did, though most of it went over my head and she’d said not to worry
that someone would sit with me properly tomorrow and go through it all at a slower pace. The
products on the dressing table, what each one was for and how to use it. The wardrobe and where everything was folded and hung. She did it all without rushing me and without making me feel like I/
was supposed to know things I didn’t know and when she finally said goodnight and pulled the
door closed behind her the room went quiet.
I stood in the middle of it.
The fire had burned down to something lower and steadier than it had been when I first came in
but the room was still warm and the warmth was real and present in a way that the cold of the
shack had never fully left my bones no matter what season it was. I stood in the middle of the
room and I breathed it in and I tried to let it be what it was.
I looked at the bed.
I’d been looking at it and then looking away from it all evening, the way you kept returning to
something you weren’t sure was safe to want yet. It was made properly, the covers pulled back on
one side by one of the staff at some point during the evening, an invitation that was so normal and
so foreign at the same time that I didn’t know how to receive it
I was fifteen the last time I slept in a bed.
I remembered the one in the family home. It hadn’t been much, a narrow frame and a thin mattress
and a cover that had seen better days, but it had been mine and I’d slept in it every night for fifteen
years and I hadn’t understood until it was gone what it meant to have something as simple as a
surface that kept you off the floor.
This bed was nothing like that one.
I walked to it and I sat down on the edge carefully, like sitting fully was a permission I hadn’t been
given yet. The mattress took my weight without complaint. The covers where my hand rested
were thick and real and I pressed my fingers into them and felt the give of it.
Nobody was going to take this away.
I said that to myself clearly and plainly and tried to make it land somewhere it would stick. Nobody
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* Learning the silence–1
+25 Points
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