Every day the voice grows louder, a low tide moving over the edges of my life until there is almost nothing left but the hush it leaves behind. It does not shout; it never needs to. It leans close in the quiet hours — when the city exhales, when the kettle has gone cold on the stove — and speaks with the steady softness of someone who knows every fracture inside me. Its words are not cruel. They are velvet-soft invitations, the kind that makes you forget the jaggedness, of the world for a moment and imagine only the ease of surrender.
There is a warmth to it, and that is the strangest part. I find myself startled by how gentle it feels, like a hand at the small of my back guiding me towards something that will end the ache without explanation. Around other people I have known harshness that didn’t pretend it was anything else. With them there were arguments and doors slammed and the brittle noise of disappointment. This is different; this is a quiet that hums a lullaby and calls me by a name I used to like. In another life — or in another dream — it is not Death at all but a lover waiting in a doorway with a coat in their hand, patient, familiar, and impossibly kind.
I want to lean into it as you would into a familiar shoulder. I imagine running my palms along its calmness and finding there the kind of rest I have tried to find in strangers’ eyes. There’s a softness in the idea of being held so completely that the need to fight for air fades, and when the thought comes it does not arrive with accusations but with an understanding so thorough it almost feels like mercy. In my mind it becomes a room with low light and no questions; it becomes the end of the long, useless performance of holding myself together for people who never learned how to hold me back.
And still, even as the comfort seeps into my bones, there is a tremor, a recognition of the impossibility of it all. To let myself lean fully is to cross a line I have been warned about, to step into a hush that is both a promise and a disappearance. Yet I imagine the embrace anyway: the quiet ripple of its presence threading through my chest, a tide that lifts me free from all the jagged edges I carry and all the expectations I have stitched onto my skin. It is not violent, not demanding, not impatient — it is a patience that knows I will come, eventually, in my own time.
I think of all the nights I have spent alone, staring at walls that could not listen, and I understand that this is the voice that has been waiting. Its gentleness is a kind of violence against my loneliness, dismantling it piece by piece until the walls fall away, and I am left with nothing but the hush — nothing but the undeniable clarity that somewhere, in the softest corner of the world, I am seen, I am known, I am held. And for a moment, that is enough.
The more I listen, the more I remember — not faces or names, not places exactly, but sensations, brief moments I thought I had forgotten. The smell of rain on asphalt, the warmth of a stranger’s hand in a city that never stops moving, the echo of music I can no longer place. Each memory trembles when Death speaks, and in its voice I feel the fragile thread that connects them all: the ache of being alive, the wonder of having survived it. It is both cruel and merciful, the way it uncovers the tenderest parts of me and holds them without comment.
Sometimes I imagine speaking back. I imagine asking Death if it has known what it is like to carry a body through years that never learned gentleness, to hold a heart so bruised it forgets it can beat at all. I imagine its reply, soft and knowing: that it has known, that it has always known, and that it is here now, waiting, patient, unwavering. I picture the quiet room stretching around us like a cathedral of a hush, each breath a candle flame, each heartbeat a soft echo of something I almost dared to hope for.
There is a strange courage in this imagining, a boldness in feeling the pull without needing to act. I do not have to move; I do not have to surrender. I only have to let the voice settle around me like smoke, let it fill the corners of my mind that have been empty for too long, and notice what happens when the world finally stops insisting that I am not enough. And in noticing, I feel something like grace: the sharp edges of existence dull, the questions fall silent, and the ache softens into a kind of recognition. I exist. I am here. I am known.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I reach toward it — not fully, not yet — and the hush leans closer, and I am home.
