The Morning It All Felt Still

I wake before the birds. There was a time when that meant survival, not peace. Back then, I rose to predict the mood of the day, studying every sound for warning. The room smelled of smoke and restraint, the air held hostage to his temper. Then I woke before the light because it was safer. Now I wake into stillness. The quiet doesn’t demand anything from me. I can simply exist.

My body always moves before thought. It disgusts me. I’m a trained dog crawling for a command that’s never coming. The quiet presses in, thick with what used to follow. I almost wait for it, the breath, the shift, the reminder that I was only ever tolerated when serving. Then it comes. The realisation that I don’t think I will ever trust the silence, it makes me uncomfortable, as if threat still lingers inside of it. The air behaves as if he still owns it, its heavy and well trained. The sheets lie flat and tense, holding the discipline of nights spent motionless. I haven’t moved in my sleep for years, a trick my body learned to survive. Even now, alone, I wake exactly as I fell, careful not to disturb a ghost. The stillness takes me back to when I spent my mornings frozen in anticipation, rehearsing my innocence for hours, only to have it dismantled before 8am on a Tuesday, as if character assassination were part of the routine.

Behind my bed, pampas grass leans through the black metal frame, mustard plumes brushing the wall. The air smells of incense, dragon’s blood burning slow and sweet. Above the bed hangs my daughter’s drawing, our family climbing a hill made of bright beads. Both remind me that fragility can outlast cruelty. Around them are things that make me feel alive, prints acquired from markets, mismatched ceramics, an elephant shelf adorned with memories. The air moves softly through the room now. It breathes, but part of me still listens for silence to return.

It was not always like this. These same walls were once bare and white, the kind of white that hums with emptiness. The space resembled limbo, a waiting room between lives. I kept it that way because stillness was the only control I had left. I cleaned to erase my own reflection. I called it calm, but it was desperation wearing a mask. Back then, I mistook emptiness for peace and peace for love. I didn’t see how easily quiet could be turned into obedience, how easily I could be made to disappear inside it.

He used to tell me that no one else would stay. When people drifted, he said it proved he was right. I believed him. He took my warmth and turned it into fault, my naivety into something to be used. Every time I tried to draw a line, he shifted it. When he mocked me, I laughed along because the laughter hurt less than the silence that followed. That is how it works. You learn to call your own undoing devotion.

People call me resilient. They mean it kindly, though I have never known if it is a compliment or a confession. Maybe resilience is what happens when you have been broken so many times that standing becomes instinct. Maybe it is not strength at all, but a kind of surrender, a belief that pain is what you deserve because you survived it before.

When he left, the quiet was unbearable. It felt like a punishment, not freedom. I searched for noise, for chaos, for anything to fill the silence that pressed on my skin. Peace seemed threatening, almost cruel in its stillness. I missed the intensity, the way fear could make me feel alive. Sometimes I still do, self-destruction becomes a drug. Yet I remember the despair, how small I became, how peace might feel dull, but it does not leave bruises.

Healing comes slowly. I filled the space with scent and colour, teaching my body that it was safe. I learned that comfort can be as loud as panic if you have never known it. The light in the mornings became my reminder that not everything that touches me wants to take something away.

Now the space feels different. The same walls that once glared sterile hold warmth. The air moves easily. The colour stays. I still sense the shadow of him sometimes, a trace caught between memory and reflex, but it fades quickly. The sound of the kettle, the weight of my daughter’s laughter, the smoke curling through morning light, these things drown it out.

I have been told that I make beauty out of what should have broken me. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is the only way I know to live with it. There is a quiet power in transforming pain, in turning what was meant to destroy you into something that breathes again.

The sun creeps slowly across the space, touching the beaded hill, the small world I have built with my own hands. The light feels warm where it once felt cold. What was frozen has melted. The morning is still, and this time it belongs to me.