It wasn't the silence, no, I couldn't hear that anyway, I
had
my own little world blaring in my ears,
Radiohead or
Secret Garden or
"Today's Best Music" or something.
And it wasn't the way you stopped cleaning up after yourself, nor the way you started complaining about my mess. Not that, either.
(I'm pretty damn sure you always complained and never cleaned up, only now in the silence and cold it was magnified).
I knew when you started walking more evenly, steadily, hunched into the walls. When you started lurking in our house is when I knew it'd crept on us and crept on us and crept so far there was nothing to do but slink too.
There are ghosts, I believe in them; ghosts of ourselves are skimming the outer edges of our lives and creeping around the evidence.