The Quiet World

Janelle Año
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read

The first word to go is self. She learns this when she buys something at the convenience store. She gets something for him — his favorite magazine, one of those flesh mags — and a fistful of candy bars. The cashier makes small talk. He gestures towards the magazine, arches an eyebrow in question. “Oh, for my boyfriend,” she laughs. “The candy’s for myself,” she tries to add, but she stumbles over the words.

But it’s not so hard, living without a sense of self, she discovers. If you put your mind to it. The Buddhists even think of it as a virtue. She cries the first few nights but after a while she learns to accept it, like the fact of decay. There are workarounds, oblique ways of referring to things. What’s your favorite movie? “The one he likes so much. The one that Ebert gave 4 stars to, that was a great one. Where the girl matador falls into a coma and only his words can wake her up.” The next words she loses are small: read, alone, sun, air. She spends her nights listening to music, straining to hear the words. Then, the next word to go is love. This one surprises her — it was one of her favorites, she was always saying it. “I loved the movie,” she’d say during those nights they would spend curled up in bed, their faces lit by the glow of his laptop’s screen. When she lost the word for movie, she would just look at him and say, “Love.” But it was gone.

She starts losing her words harder and faster. The last to go is hurt — without love, there is no hurt — but by then she’s barely speaking anyway. She spends all her time looking out windows; music stopped making sense a long time ago. But she’s not unhappy. There are worse things to be, she thinks. And she’s lost the word for sadness.


Inspired by Jeffrey McDaniel’s The Quiet World

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