There is a kind of silence that feels like drowning. This is not that kind. This is the kind that breathes. The kind that sits at the centre of your room and hums, softly, like a tune that only you can remember.
The pool is cold this morning. Not hostile. Not sharp or punishing. Just cold enough to remind my skin that I am wide awake. Cold enough to bring a smile to my lips. I step in slowly. One concrete stair at a time. Letting the water rise, letting it claim me. Ankles. Knees. Hips. Ribcage. Collar bone. Eyes. Then gone. Submerged. The sting is brief. The relief, immediate.
It’s the only place I let my body forget gravity. Forget names and tasks and the way the world claws at your skin just for existing in it. Underwater, no one asks you to smile. No one expects you to answer questions that feel like autopsies.
I float. I sink. I rise again. Water always make me feel weightless, as if I am flying in the water. Water not only carries my body’s weight off me but also the quiet tightness I carry in my shoulders, the invisible grip I keep around my own spine. In water, these things soften. They don’t disappear but they loosen. They leave me alone for a while. I push off the wall with my feet and let my arms find rhythm.
Glide. Breathe. Glide. Breathe.
There’s something very special about swimming. Something private and precise. I neither swim to compete nor to burn calories. I swim because it’s the only time my body actually listens. The only time it doesn’t resist me. The only time my body doesn’t act two steps ahead of my mind. The only time I forget about all the anger that threatens to break-free any moment.
I dive again—breaststroke, the way I like it—deeper this time. Underwater, I open my eyes. Blurry shapes. Liquid sunlight. The floor of the pool shimmer and wobble beneath me, humming that thick, pressure-filled silence I’ve come to crave. It’s strange, how sound disappears underwater but everything still feels so loud. The water roars and whispers at the same time. That contradiction…it wraps around my curves and stays there.
One evening, this exhausted co-worker sighed, “God, I wish I was a jellyfish. So free. Just floating through life.” Everyone nodded around the table, agreeing and visibly exhausted. I didn’t say a word. Because no, I’ve never envied jellyfish.
I don’t want to be brainless. I don’t want to drift, surrendering to the current. I don’t want to be spineless, teethless, choiceless. A life with no friction.
If anything, I’d want to be an amphibian. A creature that belongs to both worlds. Frogs. Salamanders. Caecilians. The axolotl—strange, little, soft, pink miracle (looking all unbothered and slightly smug, like my Boba). Half water, half land. Built for contradiction. Creatures that can swim and walk. Live and leave. Born to breathe underwater and then step out like they invented dry ground. Exist in two worlds and never feel torn.
Yes, that. I want both. I’ve always wanted both. To belong to both places. Water and land. Stillness and motion.
I’ve always been greedy—not for things, but for ‘states of being’. I want the full experience, top to bottom. I want to float and fly. To be silent and seen. I want stillness and speed. I want the deep, aching calm of solitude and the thrill of the surface. I want to be submerged and breathing. Drowning and alive. The submersion and the surfacing. To drown a little and then breathe again, fully, painfully, gratefully. I have these strangest habits. I turn the fan off and make myself sit in the sweat for some time and then turn the fan on, just to feel the that rush of cool breeze on my skin. I am, by design, a walking contradiction, like life in general.
I surface again. Take a greedy breath and let the air slap my lungs awake. The cold breeze graze my wet cheeks. I shiver gratefully, looking around the pool area. Still empty. Good.
People think I’m content. And I am. But what they miss is that I want more of what I already love. Not something else. Not something bigger. Just more of the exact thing that sets my bones humming. Like how, these days, I wake up every morning to the stillness I once begged the universe for. No buzzing notifications. No unexpected calls and forced meetings. No shallow conversations at office corridors or awkward laughter over things that made no sense. No deadlines.
Just the whir of ceiling fans. The slow awakening of a new day. And the low, judgmental meow of my cat, Boba, perched like a black gargoyle from The Dracula on the windowsill. She always stares at me like I’m late for an appointment I didn’t know I made with the Devil. We have an understanding, she and I. She doesn’t purr unless I’ve earned it. And I don’t expect love from creatures who owe me nothing. Boba is black as a storm cloud and twice as moody.
We get along. I named her Boba not just because I like bubble tea but also because boba by itself doesn’t have any taste. It only reflects what it receives. You add sugar, it becomes sweet. And I shower her with plenty of affection and I receive the same, in return.
My new flat still smells like fresh paint and the over-powering nasty scent of detergent. The walls are bare, like blank pages daring me to write something permanent. I haven’t put up my photos and wallpapers. But I know I will. Eventually. I’ve lived in so many temporary places that the idea of ‘settling’ feels like a lie people tell themselves to sleep at night. But this place, this home, was paid for with fragments of my life. One breakdown at a time. One paycheck at a time. One blood-and-bone decision to stay when all I wanted was to drop everything and just vanish. Poof.
I signed the housing loan papers with a trembling hand and a quiet prayer to no deity in particular. I’m not religious. Never been. I am my own emergency contact. Always have been. At least, ever since last year. The tiles are cold yet warm. The curtains are not too long but not too short either; the right length. The renovation workers smelled like fresh cement, chemicals and mild disdain for my independence. I let them think what they wanted. I’ve never been good at explaining myself.
When I offered them water, they asked me, ‘Mam, you are married, right? Where is your husband?”
“I buried him under the floorboards.”
They laughed. I didn’t.
Apart from the workers, there are no visitors. No housewarming parties.
No scented candles shaped like stupid flowers gifted by co-workers I barely tolerate. None of the exhausting and fake pleasantries that feel anything but pleasant. I took my accumulated leave and told my team I was going on a long overdue vacation. They think I’m in Bali. Let them. The truth is simpler.
My phone is face-down on the kitchen counter. My laptop is shut. My inbox can rot for all I care. A digital detox is long overdue anyway. I have a black cat that doesn’t kill me in my sleep (hopefully), a functioning kitchen, a balcony with a splendid view, enough stash of snacks and a playlist that understands me better than anyone else ever has. Sometimes, that’s enough.
No prince. No palace. No marriages on a whim. No regrets. No poisoned apples or glass slippers. No grand curtain-calls. Just me. Myself; the version of happiness I carved with my own two hands. This is my fairy tale and I believe I earned every chapter. Even the ugly ones. Even the ones I had to burn and rewrite. And if I ever want to add a new character, I will. But for now? This moment tastes like freedom. And I’m not changing a damn thing.
I know that my vacation isn’t permanent and that I’d eventually have to step into the battleground in a few weeks. Yes, I know. But that’s okay. At least, now I have my own house, something that I’ve always only dreamed of. And it’s not like I’m afraid of people. I just don’t want to be around them. I can stand on a stage and speak to a crowd. I can easily command a room full of strangers and make them listen (I wouldn’t have survived at my office for 5 years as a team leader if not). But afterward, I want to disappear. Put myself in a box labelled fragile, do not open without care, understanding and lots and lots of patience and curl up inside it.
Boba usually knocks something off the table and stares at me like it’s my fault. I give her tuna. She gives me indifference. We understand each other perfectly. The nights when the power goes out suddenly, without any warning, as it always does, I rummage through the cupboards and light a candle. The flame flickers like it has something to say and I listen, but it never did. In the end, the candle never tells me anything. But watching the flame make me remember.
How I walked through the empty flat on the first day like I was rehearsing for a one-woman play no one asked to see. The echo of my own footsteps was applause. Boba’s indifference was a standing ovation. She padded across the floor with the grace of a creature that believed in nothing and feared even less. She was black and sleek and morose, and she fit here—with me—perfectly. I’d bought the flat after years of skipped lunches, polite emails, working overtime, pulling all-nighters and merciless loans.
Sometimes I think about him. My uncle. The only person who knew me, at least 50 percent. I still expect him to visit. Still imagine his smile when I tell him I finally bought a place. He’d probably say something silly like, “Wow, where’s my room? Do you have it ready?”
I kick harder, letting my body cut through water like I’d suddenly grown gills. Everything inside me slowed. Softened. Stilled. I submerge and emerge. No thoughts, just muscle memory and the whisper of water in my ears. The water’s resistance is honest. The rhythm, familiar. I live for that breathless second between going under and coming up again—that tight, floating silence where everything feels held. Paused. No one expects anything from me in a pool. I dove again, deeper than before. And again. The water held me like it always does. Without question, without noise.
God, I miss him. He was the only person who ever held me the same way. He died last year. A quiet, unexpected accident in the countryside. No one knew for a while. Now, he’s just gone. And I can’t believe that the world still goes on. I miss the delicious and elaborate meals he used to cook for me. Eating. It’s the one part of me that’s always been dramatic. The rest of me is maybe a bit measured but when it comes to food, I demand fireworks. I want flavour that holds my hand and makes eye contact. Nothing half-hearted, nothing bland. My uncle used to say that I had the palate of a retired Michelin chef and the entitlement of a queen. He used to tease me “Do you eat to live or live to eat, you glutton?”
He wasn’t wrong. I’ve skipped meals out of spite, of stubbornness, of sheer indifference. I’ve walked into kitchens, opened cabinets, stared into the void, looked down on the dishes on the dining table and walked away because nothing called to me. I don’t negotiate with my appetite. I either want something, or I don’t. There’s no in-between. Feasting or fasting. Everything or nothing. I still live by that.
Most days I cook. Carefully. Reverently. I dice vegetables like I’m slicing time itself, boil the water to the perfect temperature. I eat slowly, like I’m tasting the world for the first time. Not out of mindfulness—no way! I hate that word—but out of pure, selfish joy. I don’t care about nutrition labels. I care about how the butter melts into the pan. How the garlic sizzles. How the steam curls and how the scents pull me in, tantalizingly so. I plate my food neatly. Not for Instagram but for myself. It matters to me that my food looks good, smells good and tastes good. That life tastes good. People find that odd. But people find most things about me odd.
Like, how I read. Old things, mostly. Classics with its pages yellowed. Books that are mostly forgotten. Books that smell of that musty scent of being worn out and still surviving across space and time. Words that stretch across years and still feel like they know me. Virginia Woolf when I’m brooding. Sylvia Plath when I’m feeling murderous. Mary Shelly when I want to play with knives in my mind. I read like it’s breathing. Ayn Rand when I’m feeling catty. The margins of my copy of Jane Eyre look like a masterpiece filled with sticky notes. No one gets to see them but me.
The way I sing, too. The walls are good listeners. Boba is not. My uncle was a good listener too, he would even encourage me to sing louder. He made me want to sing louder but I didn’t get the chance to. At least, not yet. I sing in the kitchen when I cook. In the shower. While feeding Boba, who usually responds with unamused stares and aggressive tail flicks. I sing lullabies to myself. Sometimes, to no one in particular, to nothing. Some days, I sit in the balcony and sing, letting the wind carry my voice to some stranger’s ears. There’s something exhilarating about singing. It’s one of the few things I really enjoy.
I swim at least three times a week and I don’t wear a watch when I swim. But I knew it had been three hours when my arms and thighs began to ache in that delicious, earned way. My body knew. As an entity that was made for long swims and longer silences, I could go on swimming but I decided to stop. For today. The sun had shifted. The pool wasn’t empty anymore. I pulled myself out. Water streamed down my back, off my shoulders, curling around my ankles like it didn’t want to let go as I padded slowly across the tiled floor.
Two men walked past, their shorts hanging low, their eyes roving my body. One of them whistled. I met his eyes. Held it. Then let my eyes drift past him. Effortlessly. Like he was an object on the shelf of a store I’d never shop from. I couldn’t care less. I walked past barefoot, unhurried, wrapping my towel around me like sealing an envelope with precision.
Yes, I have the kind of body that gets labelled as ‘hot.’ Strong. Fit. Symmetrical and curvy in the right way. But that’s not something I worked for. That’s just what happens when you swim for three hours a day and eat like every meal is a conversation with yourself. People compliment it like it’s a miracle. Like it’s the masterpiece. But I’ve always felt like I just…live inside it. Like a tenant. It’s a clean, capable house. My body is just the hallway. My mind is the treasure trove. And no one’s ever come close to finding the door. Except, maybe, my therapist who came ‘this close’ to finding the door.
I used to go for therapy for a few months after college after that incident. Even though everyone thought that I was a psychopath or someone suffering from depression, it was neither. I had anger-management issues, yes but depression? Nope. Psychopathic tendencies? No way. Even my therapist couldn’t believe how healthy I was and how thoroughly I loved and enjoyed my life, every moment of it. I ended up with a detention for my ‘improper behaviour and conduct.’ Also, banned from something that I used to enjoy very much.
That made me angry too. But I was angry once before. Angry enough to burn the world. Angry enough to fight anyone, anything. Now, I had smothered that anger with therapy and silence and solitude—but the wiring is still in here, somewhere. People thought I was anti-social and depressed. But I wasn’t depressed. I was furious. Unapologetically, spectacularly angry. And I didn’t know what to do with all of it.
I punched a wall once. Just once. It hurt. The wall didn’t learn anything. That’s when I started swimming again. And now, everything is so perfect. Very very perfect. The kind of retirement life I wanted. Instead of mid-life crisis.
The ding of the elevator seems oddly ominous. Water from the swim still clings to me, sliding down my spine, pooling into the crease of my elbows, trailing along the backs of my thighs like a ponytail unravelling. My long hair drips in slow intervals, leaving a quiet wet trail on my back. The lobby is completely quiet. Again, I press the elevator button with the back of my knuckle. This time, the lights on the keypad goes out, indicating that the elevator is out of order. Of course. This happened more than five times already and it’s just been three weeks since I moved into this apartment.
Third floor. I could’ve easily taken the stairs on any other day. I usually would’ve. But today wasn’t about proving anything. I’d done my three hours. My body had earned stillness. But do I even have a choice? Maybe it was the universe’s way of nudging me to stretch my legs after all. Sighing, I take slow and steady steps up the stairs.
Out of nowhere, I hear a scream. Sharp. Male. Ragged with pain. It wasn’t a startled yelp. Not the kind you make when you slip on water or get surprised by a playful push from behind. Real pain. I freeze.
Something primal in me kicks in. Despite still being wet from chlorine, still high from the stillness of the pool, before I knew it, I was moving. Fast, alert, animal. I bolt back down the few steps without an ounce of hesitation. My towel flares behind me, flapping against my sides like wings.
The hallway by the pool is empty. Except for the chaos unfolding in front of me. One of the men from earlier—the one who’d whistled—is on the ground, writhing. Blood leaked from a gash in his neck, pooling beneath him. The other was fighting. Not just fighting but grappling. With the security guard who seem wild-eyed, unlike the last time I saw him. I met him a few days ago at the gate and he offered me a warm smile which I returned with a respectful but curt nod. Smiling is exhausting.
The security guard isn’t throwing punches. He is lunging. Snarling. His teeth snaps at the other man’s throat with animalistic hunger. It doesn’t feel drunk. It doesn’t feel high. It feels wrong. I freeze again. Not from fear but from confusion. From that instinctive, helpless moment when the rules of the world glitch and your brain can’t quite catch up. At least, not immediately.
Blood. Biting. Guttural noises. Growling.
I scan my surroundings. No security. No witnesses. Not even the creepy janitor who always shuffled by with his mop around this time. Just me. I exhale. Then I move. Fast. Quiet. I drop to my knees beside the injured man. My towel—still damp, still heavy with chlorine—goes straight to his neck. I press hard. The blood soaks through instantly. I grab his cold and shaky hand and press it over the wound.
“Hold it. Tight. Don’t move,” I said, voice low, solid. I don’t wait for his nod. I stand up. The other man is still fighting, barely keeping the attacker from tearing into his neck. The security guard is growling like something had stripped away language and left only appetite. His fingers try to claw, grab something, anything. There’s no fear in his face. Only intent.
I had no weapon. Just wet skin. Bare feet. A brain that stayed a few steps ahead when it counted. Something is burning under my skin. Not panic. Readiness. I wasn’t trained for this. But I was made for it.
Like I said, once, a long time ago, I’d been angry enough to burn everything. To fight everything. I’d buried it since—with therapy and quiet, with books and long swims—but it was still inside me. As it always would be. And now its time to finally let it out.
---
It’s been six months since the world ended. Give or take. Did it end with a bang or a whimper? I’m not sure. Because my world hasn’t ended. Its nowhere near an ending.
But the calendar on my wall is stuck on the day they announced the last official evacuation. I don’t flip it anymore. Time is soft now. Slippery. I count mornings by the light crawling across my windowsill, by the sounds of the birds chirping, by how many heads I bash in before breakfast.
I didn’t leave. I didn’t want to. Everyone asked why—back when phones still worked and network connection was there, back when concern still existed. “Come to the safe zone,” they said. But no, this was my house. I bled for this house. Scraped years into it, fought for every brick. I didn’t buy it just to abandon it to a bunch of walking corpses and a cowardly system.
At first, it was denial. A thick, stubborn fog. My brain just refused to compute that the thing I’d seen in movies and video games was actually here. Real. Ugly. Rotting. And spreading. I actually laughed at how ridiculous it all felt. Like living in the parody of a horror movie that was badly-made in the first place. I waited, thinking, “This’ll go away like the Corona pandemic, maybe a few weeks or months. Things will go back to normal.” It didn’t.
Then came the spiral. I researched everything. Virus mutation theories. Military dispatches. DIY flamethrowers. I ordered drones full of supplies like a shopaholic maniac, while the world still pretended to function. Solar panels, canned goods, rainwater filters, batteries, knives, barbed wire, a fishing rod I didn’t know how to use. Enough gear to start a war or survive one. Anything and everything. I spent all the money I’d saved like it meant nothing. Because it suddenly did.
I remember those first few days like they were stretched across years. Sirens. Helicopters. Gunshots. Screams. Hysteria in the eyes of people pretending not to panic. Cops with guns and cuffs and no answers. The city sounded like a broken alarm clock that wouldn’t shut up. It was worse than the Corona pandemic, at least, it was peaceful back then. I watched from my window and swam in the mornings using the semi-clean terrace pool.
And then came the ache.
The house I worked a decade for. My quiet little victory. Mine. After all the sacrifices. The silent meals. The missed parties. The hellish commutes. My name was still etched on it, but everything it represented had been yanked out from under me. There were days I just sat on the floor, touching the walls. Thinking. Was this all a joke?
But then…something in me stirred.
I began to fill the space. Not just with gear and tools and stupid luxuries I couldn’t afford before. But with life.
A night lamp I’d always wanted. Satin clothes. Herbal perfume. Survival kits. Glittering art supplies. More books than I’ll ever finish. I planted tomatoes and other veggies in the balcony pots and trained my creepers to crawl up the balcony railings. I set up rain barrels and solar chargers and motion sensors. Self-sufficiency has always been my religion. And now my faith was tested.
After returning from my scavenger hunt for groceries and new trinkets, I lock the main gates everyday. I bought one flat on the third floor while shedding tears of blood. And now the whole premises is mine. I checked. No one else lives here now, the last family evacuated months ago. A pity, really. They had a cute Rottweiler. I’m sure there must be other survivors in the city, somewhere out there but I haven’t come across anyone else in months.
The amphibian in me woke up. The one that once sulked and fought and tried so hard to behave. I always knew I was made for two worlds. The old world, where I held my breath and remained polite. Where I was expected to smile when I felt like screaming. Where I was expected to lower my fists instead of breaking jaws. Where I was expected to apologize for taking up space. For being too loud, too strong, too fast, too much. And this new one, where my rage isn’t an illness. It’s a gift.
When the infected ones come. Slow, snarling, snapping their jaws, I don’t flinch. I don’t scream. I move. Like water. Like someone who’s been waiting her whole life for a zombie apocalypse. Baseball bat, crowbar, metal pole, sturdy walking cane, plumbing pipes. Anything. I looted a deserted camping store once. My fists, when I’m feeling nostalgic. I manage not to get infected because I’m quick on my feet and I avoid the problem area. Their teeth.
Every fight is therapy. Every squelch of muscles is a release.
It’s funny now that I think back. To that time when I broke a guy’s nose in college after he cornered me and tried to kiss me out of nowhere. How they sent me to the Principal’s office. I defended myself a little too well, and somehow I was the one termed ‘aggressive.’ They made sure I quit MMA that year. Labelled me unstable. Told me I needed ‘help,’ I had ‘anger issues’ and needed to ‘channel it better.’
Well. Here I am. Channelling.
There’s no one left to scold me. No uncle to sigh in disappointment. No therapist scribbling on a pad. No HR department. No one chastising me to ‘tone it down.’ Just me, the silence, and the satisfying crunch of justice. And yet—what surprises me most—is how peaceful it is. This ghost town.
The stillness between attacks. The sky untouched by airplanes. The clean air. The whisper of wind through the windows. I walk around barefoot. I sing out loud now. I read poetry to the cats that have started visiting my balcony. They listen better than people ever did.
I don’t know if the world will rebuild. I don’t care. Because I have.
In a world that stripped everything down to the bone, I have started a new chapter. I don’t know how long I’d stay alive.
But I’ve never felt more alive.
It was quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that presses on your eardrums, but the kind that lives in the walls, the kind that lingers like a scent long after the world has left the room.
I liked it.
But there is a sound the world makes when it stops needing things from you. It is not silence. It’s quieter than that. Maybe, the world did end with a bang after all.
Even that was silent.
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