Almost Nothing

For many years I wrote a diary. I do not really know why I wrote a diary, because not much happened in my life. To be a little more precise: Almost nothing happened in my life.

It started when I started being inside. It started with me being on sick leave from work - first 50%, then full sick leave. To keep track of the days, weeks and months, I wrote a few words every day in the diary - in the log. There were mostly such things as: "Heavy rain today", or "overcast", or "fog clouds hung down from the mountain tops".

I wrote a few words every day. Some days I wrote only one or two words, for example "Gray day". Or "Rain." Or I could write a little more, like "today the sun came back over Heklenuten".

For the last 19 years I have lived in this block. There are eight apartments in the block, and a common entrance. Four apartments in one part, four in the other. It is almost always quiet in the block. It is so quiet that when it rains I can hear the rain that hits the edge of the balcony above mine and that runs down and hits the floor of my balcony. When the rain has stopped, I can hear single drops falling down and hitting the edge of the railing on my balcony. Small sounds of droplets hitting the metal, gradually larger spaces between the droplet sounds, until they stop completely.

- Maybe the rain has stopped now, I think.

It is so quiet in the block that I can hear some private events that are sometimes easy to identify. On the floor above me stands the man who lives there on the toilet and pees. He always has a lot of pee. I hear how the beam hits hard down the bottom of the toilet, I imagine the splashing in the bowl when the strongest part of the beam comes. Then I can hear how he pinches and stops, and then there is more, always a little more. Three or four times, until it's over. Empty.

When I go to the bathroom, I always make sure that my jet does not hit right down to the bottom of the toilet bowl, so that that sound occurs. Since I know that I can hear when the neighbor above me pees on the toilet, I also know that he or the neighbor below me can hear me and my beam, if I do not take care.

I'm not talking to anyone. I do not remember when I last spoke to anyone. It's a little weird, but I'm used to it. In fact, it was not difficult at all. I simply stopped talking. I think it took many weeks before I realized it. That I had not used my voice to talk to for many days, almost a whole month. It came almost by itself. It was not difficult. I just stop talking.

I decided to try my voice. I had the TV on, suitably loud, as I thought the voices of the people talking on the TV would be if they were real people in the room. I tried to come in with my voice when the people on the screen had said what they were going to say. But I quickly noticed that I was talking in the mouths of the others in the TV studio, and it was almost a bit chaotic. I gave up trying to talk. I decided that I would wait until later to try to awaken my voice to life again.

I usually have the TV on, not too loud, nor almost without sound, almost like the sound I hear is from the one who cages over me. I have on TV mostly because I need to have some voices around me.