It was a cold, rain-soaked evening when I returned home. The house, a creaking relic of my family’s past, stood on a lonely street. I hadn’t spoken to my father in years, not since the argument that tore us apart. I never imagined that the next time I’d see him, he would be lying dead in the living room.
His body was slumped over in the armchair where he always sat, as if waiting for me. The sight of him, so lifeless, shocked me into paralysis. My father, the man who had once been so larger than life, was now a still figure in an old, dusty chair.
The storm outside raged, pounding against the windows, and for a brief moment, I thought about calling for help. But something kept me in that room. It wasn’t fear of his death, but the eerie silence that surrounded it. No one else knew I was here. I was alone. Trapped.
Hours passed, and with each ticking second, the atmosphere grew heavier. I didn’t move, I couldn’t. His body seemed to whisper secrets, and I found myself fixating on things I had long buried in my memory. Childhood afternoons, the warmth of his laughter, the shadows of our arguments, and the coldness that settled between us like a thick fog.
I stood, frozen between grief and guilt, wondering what I could have said differently, wondering if there was some last message in his stillness that I could never hear. But the house, once full of life, now seemed to press its walls against me, trapping me inside, sealing me with the weight of unresolved pain and death.
As the storm rumbled on outside, I realized I was not merely trapped with my father’s body, but with everything unsaid, every regret, and every moment we had lost in the void between us.
And there, in that silent house, I waited—unsure if I was waiting for the storm to end or for the weight of the past to let me go.