Bedok North Silence

Artwork by : Shain Parwiz

Bedok North Street 2.
That address feels like a weight pressed into my skull. Not a home. Not anymore.
Just coordinates on a map tied to a ghost I’m not strong enough to face.

It used to be warmth.
Her flat was the only one that felt like a real place to land.
Not just during the loud, fake cheer of holidays, but always.
The only home I ever begged to stay in.
There was something in the quiet there, something that understood me better than any person did.
Now it’s just a shell.

I went back once. Just once. After she was gone.
After the beeping stopped.
After the sixty-three days in that sterile hospital blur.
I thought maybe I’d find her there, or at least feel her one more time.

I did. But not in the way I wanted.

She was everywhere.
In the slant of light through the window,
in the creak of floorboards,
in the silence that rang too loud.

Every flicker of shadow felt like her moving in the kitchen.
Every settling groan of the old building felt like her voice trying to reach me.
I should’ve felt held. I didn’t.
It was suffocating.
A silence sharpened by grief, filled with ghosts too vivid to ignore.

I didn’t sleep.
Just lay there, still, as the weight of her absence pressed into every breath.
By the time morning came, I was already gone.

I haven’t been back.
Can’t go back.
She’s in that place. Not just in memory, in the walls, the air, the light.
To return would be to step into a living memory that won’t let go.
And I don’t have the strength to be haunted like that again.

So I keep my distance.
Let the address sit like a stone I refuse to turn over.
That home is gone.
What’s left is a monument to her absence
and the silence that swallowed everything after her last breath.

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This piece is not a part of a larger collection titled Rust and Silence. It is just a standalone piece that I found looking into old journals. If you feel something, stay a while.