Into Great Silence

If things have been rather quiet from us of late, it's in part because both halves of the Darwin clan spent the first half of the week virtually without internet. I'm now in Columbus, starting my new job and living in one of these furnished "corporate housing" apartments, and the rest of the family is in Cincinnati at MrsDarwin's ancestral home -- where the truck with all our worldly possessions just arrived yesterday and buried everyone in boxes.

One of the things I can tell is going to take the most getting used to in this divided existence we'll be living during the week for the next couple months until we find a house in Columbus is the utter silence of living alone in an apartment -- something which, now I think on it, I have never done before. Coming home to the apartment Monday night, especially after the whirlwind of preparation and moving over the last two weeks, was disconcerting. I'd only got half-way through putting away my first load of groceries and setting out food to make dinner when I realized that the silence was pressing in hard from every direction. I could hear the neighboring apartment's TV like distant voices. The rain against the windows. The quiet murmur of the refrigerator. Even the internet, which can serve as a sort of ascii-only pub at which at least some of the regulars are always in, wasn't up yet. As I sat down with food, I found myself switching on the TV and watching a sitcom (something I haven't done in years) just to avoid the utter, oppressive silence.