The Hum of Empty Spaces

The refrigerator hum is a low-grade anxiety now, like a persistent note on a cello. It’s always there, vibrating through the linoleum in the kitchen, mixing with the drone of Mr. Henderson's construction site down the street and the distant screech of those freight trains they keep trying to reroute. I’ve been tracking it – not scientifically, exactly – but more like… cataloging a feeling. It started subtly, really, after Jerry retired. Suddenly there was this *space*, you know? And that space filled with all sorts of things: the unfinished jigsaw puzzles, the overgrown rose bushes he kept wanting to prune, the way his silence stretched out longer between us.

It’s not just the noise, though. It's the layering. I find myself noticing everything – the shift in the light through the blinds at 3 pm, the way my daughter, Chloe, folds her socks a certain way (it’s always slightly off-kilter), the fact that I haven’t called my sister in weeks. And it all feels… amplified. Like listening to a radio station tuned too high, with static buzzing underneath everything you actually hear. The low frequency makes me think about those studies – sleep disturbance, sad mood, concentration difficulties. It’s almost like these aren't independent things but part of the same tangled wire.

I spent this morning making lists at the kitchen table—a grocery list, a to-do list for Chloe’s college application, and then just… words. Just letting them flow across the page, trying to capture the sense of this unease. Jerry says I'm getting lost in my own head again. He doesn't understand that sometimes, being lost *is* the point. He thinks a little order will fix it – a colour-coded calendar, maybe. But some things don’t respond to logic. Some things just… are.

I remember when I was working at the library in Brooklyn, organizing those old maps. You find these strange patterns, echoes of lives lived and lost, tucked away in the folds of paper. It's similar here, isn't it? Like a resonance – this relentless hum feeding into everything else until it feels like an overdetermined chord. I reread some of my blog posts – the one about the Tumblr reblog, the reflections on unsatisfying connections—and I realize how little I understood then.

It’s funny, you know, how these things develop. It wasn't really a "thing" until the refrigerator started to feel like an accusation. Like it was saying, “Look at you, sitting here with your lists, still trying to hold onto something that’s already slipping away.” I guess maybe it isn’t about finding a fix or a solution but just acknowledging the feeling itself, letting it sit there without judgment.

Chloe keeps asking me if I'm okay, of course. She doesn’t really *see* it, not in the way Jerry does – that quiet observation of my shifting expressions. She asks if I need anything and I just smile and say “no.” But sometimes she watches me, a flicker of something like concern in her eyes, and I think about how much we've changed since she was little—since she used to climb into my lap for stories.

I’m starting to think about that study – the correlations between symptoms. It sounds almost… deterministic, doesn't it? Like if you have a certain set of vulnerabilities, they’re just going to manifest in predictable ways. But I don’t believe in simple cause and effect. And yet—the low hum continues.

I sat on the porch this evening with Jerry, watching the sunset over the Ohio farmland. The air was cool, and the crickets were singing their evening song. It wasn't a perfect moment, not exactly. But there was a stillness there, a quiet acknowledgment of all the things—the anxieties, the frustrations, the subtle shifts—that had brought us to this place, sitting here together, listening to the hum.