I tell the little one, who is little no longer, “there is the ‘quiet’ and there is the ‘roar’, and in between is the living”

I gesture with my hands, I struggle with the words, because it’s just coming to me, this is what I’ve been feeling for so long, in that moment of telling her, the longing for the quiet, the staving off of the roar and the fourth thing, the thing I cannot bear, the thing I cannot face, but I do not tell her that, I do not dare: the end of all things, the inevitable, the inescapable, what underpins the preciousness of time, the forward momentum of each echo.

You want to write your way out of this and it’s impossible, you don’t have words for it, you don’t know how, you’re ill equipped. Let’s set aside that perhaps you are the cause of it. that it is all your fault because of everything you prided yourself on. You called it hubris. Indeed. You missed the signals, the warnings, ‘she doesn’t engage with the other children, she plays by herself’ and you wrote it off as her being shy, she’s just shy, we have history of that. You who was sat on the floor in kindergarten because you couldn’t shut up in class. You who always yearned to connect because you had no brothers, no sisters, no father. You didn’t have history of that, if anything it’s another addiction that you’ve tried to shed, another bad habit you try to avoid.

And you hear her weep and you wonder what pain you ignored in her short life, you think of that song, “the dreaming tree” and at some point, you won’t be able to protect her, at some point you will be in the ground with the dirt and the maggots and the worms. Or dust, or ash. Either way, you will be dead and will she suffer? You hound yourself, will she suffer? If there ever a time to believe in God and the afterlife, it is now and I cannot bring myself to it.

Between the quiet and the roar, there is the living and the absolutely certainty of the end