When You Are Hearing

Kay used to talk a lot.

Not the loud type. Just present. Responsive. Available. The kind of person whose laughter entered a room before his body fully did.

Then one day, I noticed something strange.

People were speaking to him, but he had started replying late. Not late in words. Late in spirit.

You would ask, “Kay, are you good?”
And he would say, “I’m fine,” with the accuracy of someone reading weather data from a damaged satellite.

At first, I thought it was stress. Life has a way of placing sand inside people’s engines. But this was different. He was hearing everybody, yet receiving nobody.

That is the frightening thing about exhaustion. It does not always remove sound. Sometimes, it removes meaning.

Instructions become noise.
Advice becomes furniture.
Care becomes traffic.

I think many people arrive there quietly. No alarms. No dramatic collapse. Just a gradual dimming. Like a city losing power one building at a time.

And because the body is still moving, everyone assumes the soul is too.

But sometimes a person is not absent.
They are merely underwater.

Kay smiled eventually. Spoke more too. But ever since then, I have become slower with people. Gentler with responses. Less offended by delayed warmth.

Because not everyone who is silent is proud.
Some are simply trying to return from somewhere deep.

Nugget:
The human heart has seasons where it can hear words but cannot yet carry them.