Since that day I just never went back. There wasn't a big decision, no formal announcement of it in my own head — I went home and that was it. And what followed that has a particular quality to it that I don't think I've quite named before.
The literal quiet
I don't talk in person to almost anyone now. My mum, Claws, three friends. The rest of the world, verbally, is closed to me right now. That's a very literal kind of quiet — the absence of my own voice in most rooms I'm in.
The quiet of not being at school
No bell. No corridor noise. No register, no lessons, no being physically present somewhere that spent a long time treating me badly. That absence is a relief in a lot of ways — genuinely, the quiet of not being there is easier than the noise of being there was. But it's also its own kind of strange. A whole structure that used to organise my days just isn't there anymore, and the space where it used to be hasn't fully filled in with something else yet.
The quiet where an apology should be
Nobody has said the things that should have been said. No acknowledgment, no accountability, no direct "that was wrong." That absence has a specific texture to it — a silence where something should be and isn't. I've mostly stopped waiting for it to arrive, but noticing its absence is still part of the quiet.
What fills the quiet now
Building things. Writing this blog. Claws. The few people I do talk to. Music, almost constantly, filling a space that used to have more voices in it. It's not the same as before, and I'm not going to pretend the quiet is entirely comfortable. But it's mine now, in a way the noise before wasn't, and there's something in that worth holding onto.