duration: 2 to 12 seconds· place: a held receiver· surrounds: a faint domestic background
this is the most specific of the silences. it is not your room. it is a room you are not in, made audible by the small static of a line, by the faint clink of a teaspoon a thousand miles away, by the breathing you have already learned to recognise. the other person has gone quiet. you cannot see why. you must guess from a kettle.
the telephone silence is the only silence with two halves: the half you produce by not speaking, and the half they produce by not speaking, and a third thing — the line itself, which is not silent, only emptier than usual. the absence of words on a telephone weighs more than the absence of words in a room. distance gives silence a strange density.
most telephone silences are not difficult. they are the silences in which the other person has gone to fetch the dog, or check the oven, or read the letter you wrote about. but the difficult ones — the ones after the news, or before — are the silences whose echo you will hear when you next sit by a window.