He didn't remember much about the day he came home from the hospital—only the soft warmth of a blanket and the quiet glow of sunlight through frosted windows. But he was told he barely cried. His mother liked to say he was calm from the beginning. Quiet. Peaceful.
He was the third child in the family, the youngest. His older brother was bold and full of energy; his sister was clever and constantly asking questions. Both were healthy, loud, and impossible to ignore. He, on the other hand, stayed silent for reasons no one understood at first.
When he was three, doctors confirmed what his parents had suspected—he had hearing damage. Not total deafness, but close enough. Sounds came to him like distant echoes—sometimes sharp, sometimes muffled, always inconsistent. Words blurred. Music was a low hum. Most days, the world felt far away.
His mother was kind. She didn't treat him differently—not exactly—but her time was divided. Two other children needed her too, and there were dinners to cook, appointments to keep, errands to run. She did her best to include him, to be patient. But he could feel how often her attention drifted elsewhere.
His father was present in theory. A tired man with a kind voice and worn hands, always dressed for work and rarely home before nightfall. On the weekends, he sometimes took them all to the park or made pancakes in the kitchen, but he was more often a figure glimpsed from the stairs than a true part of the day.
No one was unkind. No one shouted. But the silence between them all grew heavier with time.
He learned to fill the gaps. To smile when they laughed. To nod even when he didn't understand. He became an expert at pretending. At fading into the background. At watching.
He liked the quiet things—drawing, reading picture books, walking beneath cloudy skies. When the house was loud with his siblings' games, he would sneak away and sit by the window, watching rain streak across the glass. In that stillness, he felt something the noise never gave him—peace. Not happiness, exactly. But clarity.
Sometimes, he wondered if anyone really saw him.
His brother loved sports, his sister loved to talk—and he? He loved silence, because it was the only place where he felt whole.
And yet, even in that silence, something stirred.
A faint pull. A strange sense that the quiet wasn't just absence. That it held meaning. That it was waiting.
He didn't know what for.
Not yet.
But he could feel it, growing louder in the still places between his family's lives.
And it would begin where all things ended—with silence