The Quiet After The Storm

The house is quiet.

After a week of helping me in ways no sister should ever have to help, she and her husband are finally headed back to their lives in Minnesota. I am forever grateful for everything they did. Truly. But I also find myself yearning for silence — that deep, familiar silence that has always been the backdrop of my best mornings.

I can’t wait until I’m healed enough to go home again. To wake when my body wakes. To turn on music that sets the tone of the day. To make a cup of coffee with my own hands. To sit in the early hours listening to the neighborhood slowly stretch and groan into consciousness. Maybe even to clack softly on my keyboard, shaping the edges of a story in the dark before dawn.

It’s hard being in someone else’s space, even when that space belongs to a dear friend. And it’s fucking hard being dependent on others for things that used to be so simple — slicing up summer sausage, pouring coffee, going to the damn store. My sister did those things for me without hesitation, without complaint, every single day of the last week.

But they are things I must do again if I’m going to be free. If I’m going to be independent. If I’m going to be me.

This moment right now — this silence — is the first real quiet I’ve had since the accident. And after years of living in, loving, and thriving in silence, it feels strange to finally have some. My heart hurts watching my sister leave, but I’m also breathing easier without anyone in the room.

Maybe this silence is a preview of freedom.
A glimpse of the near future.

I thrive in silence. I thrive in solitude.
Or at least, I used to.

Right now, I’m broken.
So can I even fucking thrive at all?
I honestly don’t know.

In moments like this, it’s easy to drift toward that familiar place of anger — to lash out internally at the driver who caused this wreck, to replay imaginary confrontations, to let the fury rise and scorch everything inside me. But giving my mind to that place offers nothing. No answers. No solace. No direction. It just feeds the fire and piles chaos on top of chaos.

And staying away from that place?
God, it’s hard.
It’s so fucking hard.

I am human, after all. I fall into the same traps everyone else does. I try to corral myself, to keep my thoughts from veering into the red, but sometimes I can’t. Sometimes the anger finds the cracks and pours right through.

So that’s my battle, nearly every day:
Keeping the anger at bay.
Steering clear of thoughts that create nothing but more wreckage.
Choosing sanity over chaos, even when chaos feels justified.

And that struggle — let me tell you — is real.
Very fucking real.
Very present.