How Long Must I Wait to Forget?
written by: Monika Ajay Kaul
I woke to no birdsong. Not my usual alarm.
But the sun outside my window told me I might have missed it.
I looked at my alarm clock. It had stopped ticking. The hands were caught between seconds, like they had been startled mid-breath.
I wondered if time had simply… decided not to continue.
At first, it barely registered. You know how sleep lingers behind your ears sometimes, muddying logic. But then the silence stayed, stubborn and vast, like a hand pressing on my chest. I opened the window. No vroom of cars. No horns. No chatter. Not even the usual cough of the neighbour downstairs. The air hung heavy.
I thought I’d gone deaf. But it wasn’t me. It was everything else.
The city.. my city.. had gone mute!
I stepped out onto the road. My footsteps reverberated against buildings that once swallowed sound like eager mouths. A newspaper, yellowed and curled, rustled across the pavement. No swishing. Even the wind, once a reliable intruder, had fled.
That’s when it started feeling real.
“Where are you all?” I asked the streetlight, the closed café, the crooked bicycle chained to a gate.
No answer.
It’s strange what the absence of sound does. You start talking to yourself, not out of madness, but necessity. As if the silence might be less cruel if it had company. I spoke to a stray shoe outside the library. To the abandoned carousel in the square, its horses frozen mid-gallop. I said sorry to the sapling outside my office building… the one I’d kicked once in frustration, back when I still had meetings to be late for.
They didn’t respond, of course. But they listened better than most ever did.
My phone had died long ago, but I still carried it in my pocket. Old habits, like hope, are hard to bury. I tried talking into it once. “I’m still here,” I said. “I still remember your laugh, Aara. It sounded like the sea trying to learn jazz.” The screen stayed black.
Funny thing is, I used to beg for silence. Remember that? All of us did. “If only the world would slow down,” we’d say. “If only it could stop spinning for a moment.” And now that it had stopped so thoroughly, so perfectly. I couldn’t bear the soundlessness of it.
Do you remember the day the rivers foamed red?
I do. We watched it on our screens, calling it a ‘freak bloom’ of algae. They told us it was reversible. They always said that. Even when the skies cracked with storms in July, and winter forgot to arrive. We shushed nature like a crying infant, gave it screens, noise, distractions. But nature, it seems, has a longer memory than we do.
The silence isn’t empty. It’s full of what we erased.
I walked past the old cinema. The poster for some sequel was still up, half torn. I remembered the queues, the laughter. All of it, gone. No ash in the air. No wreckage. No blood. Just absence.
Each street I walk remembers. The school playground has a quietness shaped like children’s chortle. The hospital silence smells of disinfectant and departure. And the park, oh, the park..! It recalls picnics and discarded wrappers and the man who used to feed pigeons with a lopsided smile.
I kept walking. Past the bakery where I’d once flirted with someone over sourdough. Past the fountain that children once splashed around, now a basin of unmoving dust. The trees looked plastic. Real, but inactive. Not a single rustle. The sun shone. The sky didn’t care.
I once read that sound never truly disappears. It disperses, weakens, but lingers forever, bouncing between stars. Perhaps, somewhere in the cosmos, Earth still moans with our mistakes.
Sometimes I find a flower growing through concrete and sit beside it. I ask it questions I already know the answers to.
“Were we always this arrogant?” “Did we deserve saving?” “Would we have listened, if the warnings rhymed?”
I thought about the floods. The heat waves. The birds that stopped coming. We said things like “record-breaking” and “unprecedented.” As if novelty were comfort.
We cut forests like hair. Built walls where rivers breathed. Sprayed skies and sprayed crops and lit up oceans at night with the burn of our wanting.
Maybe the Earth didn’t fight back.
Maybe it just… withdrew.
Today, I stood at the city’s center, beneath a statue of someone we once admired. The plaque had eroded. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine noise.
Rain on rooftops. Barking dogs. Street vendors shouting deals no one believed.
But memory is cruel. It decays unevenly. I can remember my mother’s scent, but not her voice. I recall the taste of mangoes but not the songs I sang peeling them.
I sat near the library steps, back against stone that remembered warmth. I talked to myself again. Louder this time. Just to feel human.
“I miss footsteps,” I said.
I remembered a voice, like a windchime that no longer swayed.
I remembered someone singing on a terrace during lockdown years ago.
I remembered how we called silence ‘peace’ back then. Now I know better.
This silence isn’t peace. It’s memory’s aftertaste.
I don’t know if I’m the last. I don’t know if others are walking their own cities, talking to pigeons that no longer coo, pretending to be on calls just to fill their ears with something.
I found a cracked phone booth and stepped in. Picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
I waited.
Nothing.
Then I said, “I’m sorry.”
Not to anyone in particular. Just into the space where sound used to live.
I stayed in the booth long after the apology vanished.
Eventually, I walked back home. I picked up a spoon and let it fall. Nothing.
How long must I wait to forget enough to survive?
Or to remember just enough to forgive?
As dusk arrived, slower now, as if time itself had grown cautious. I murmured something I hadn’t dared in weeks:
“Please… say something.”
And then, impossibly, something stirred.
A dry petal, crumbling against the glass vase. Barely audible. But real. Or my imagination.
Hope, it seems, has a sound after all.
NOTE:
Based on the Prompt – Echoes of a Silent City
- The Measure of Redolence - November 21, 2025
- Songs Beneath the Tangerine Tree - October 18, 2025
- How Long Must I Wait to Forget? - September 18, 2025
