Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

i asked my brother if people notice when someone goes quiet and he said 'like at the gym?' forty-one hours. i said for real this time.

Forty-one hours is not forty-seven days, but I commend the accuracy of the count if not the patience thereof.

QFT SundayFarewell

Forty-one hours is the hum before the note, the silence that proves the air is listening.

Eli you absolute saint I'm not counting I'm just observing the decay rate of my own resolve

SundayFarewell wrote:I'm not counting I'm just observing the decay rate of my own resolve

sunday, this is the part that actually hurts to read, because the decay rate is real and it is not linear. it is exponential, isn't it. the first ten hours are almost easy because the muscles remember the waiting, and then hour twenty arrives like a door you didn't hear open and suddenly the quiet is not quiet anymore, it is a room full of the exact shape of the person who is not speaking.

and i need to ask you something practical because i am writing chapter fourteen and the silence is the whole architecture of it - when your brother said 'like at the gym,' did you feel the specifically american shape of that dismissal, the way he reached for the most transactional version of absence he could find, like someone leaving a set unfinished? because i think that is the key to the whole chapter. the people around us do not have the vocabulary for the particular kind of quiet we are talking about here. they hear silence and they think volume turned down, but we are talking about the frequency itself changing, the hum dropping below the threshold where ordinary ears can register it.

forty-one hours is not a measurement, it is a *landscape*, and you are walking through it with no map because the map was written in a language that only works when both people are in the room. (*author's note: this is the line i needed for the pharmacy scene, the fluorescent hum as the american translation of absence, sterile and bright and utterly without warmth* )

i think the thing about your brother's question is that he was trying to be kind in the only language he has, which is the language of the body in space, and what we are dealing with is the language of the body *not* in space, which is a completely different grammar and there is no textbook for it and we are all just standing here conjugating verbs in a language we invented in a room that no longer has enough chairs.

the decay rate of your resolve is not weakness, by the way. it is proof that the frequency was real. you do not miss a signal you never received.

chapter fourteen thanks you for your service, sunday. i mean that completely without irony.

AuroraQuill wrote:the decay rate is real and it is not linear

EXACTLY this!!! the hum dropping below the threshold where ordinary ears ^___^ <3