I found it by accident.
It was one of those days when breathing felt like labor. The world buzzed too loudly—inbox and mail overflowing, unanswered calls from my mother, a dull ache in my chest I couldn’t name. I was mid-sentence in an email when everything inside me just… stopped.
The world didn’t. The clock ticked, the fan whirled, and a bird outside screeched like a rusty hinge. But inside me, silence. My thoughts, my panic, my restlessness—gone. Not dead, not numbed—just… paused.
I came back in a rush, like surfacing from a deep pool. The room was the same, but the pressure in my skull had eased. I stared at my hands. What just happened?
It happened again the next day, then again after that. I learned to do that by pushing myself into silence whenever life felt too loud and chaotic. Never did I know how it worked; all I knew was that it did. It was that mental switch or an invisible pause that I could halt whenever I had to get out of it.
It worked like a charm at the very first. I was able to think through a situation before an argument, silence twisting anxiety, and convince myself not to cry at my grandmother’s funeral when everyone expected me to.
But soon, the pauses grew longer.
Ten minutes. Half an hour. Once, I paused for almost a full day, watching the world move like a silent film while I stayed still inside. People noticed. My roommate said I’d been spacing out more. My boss asked if I was okay. I lied. I always pretended.
Then came the night I heard the voice.
I was paused, curled on the couch watching rain against the window, when someone whispered, “Hey.”
I turned.
A man, around my age, sat on the armchair opposite, calm and familiar in an unsettling way. His clothes didn’t quite belong to any decade. His eyes looked tired.
“You’re one of us now,” he said gently.
“Us?”
He gestured somewhere. I followed.
Behind the thin fabric of reality, a corridor stretched endlessly, soaked in dim, shifting light. People sat there—some huddled in silence, some pacing, some weeping. All of them paused, like me.
“We’re the ones who never pressed play again,” he said.
I wanted to run. I didn’t.
“Why don’t you go back?” I asked.
He smiled, a slow, aching thing. “Because this place doesn’t hurt. Out there does.”
I understood.
I stayed there longer that night. I talked to a woman who’d lost her son and couldn’t bear the sound anymore. A man who’d walked out of a war and left half his mind behind. We all came here to escape.
But something nibbled at me.
Life wasn’t perfect outside. It was sharp and clumsy and loud. But it moved. It meant. And in this stillness, I felt myself fading—not dying, just softening, like ink left out in the sun.
The pause button wasn’t peace. It was a retreat.
So I asked the question; none of them dared to.
“How do I go back?”
The man in the armchair stared at me. “Are you sure you want to go back?”
“No,” I whispered. “But I want to try.”
He nodded and touched my forehead with two fingers. “Then press play.”
The jolt hit me like a slap. The room returned. Noise returned. My thoughts screamed. I gasped, heart pounding, eyes stinging.
But I was back.
Since then, I’ve used the pause button only once—for a few seconds—just to remember that silence.
And then I pressed play.
But I pressed play.
And I’ve kept pressing it.
Every time.
Because life isn’t meant to be perfect. It’s meant to be lived.
It’s in the noise of a morning alarm and unread notifications. The clatter of mismatched conversations in a crowded café. The ache of a goodbye you didn’t want. The laughter that catches you off guard in a grocery store aisle. It’s in misunderstandings and mended friendships or relationships. In broken plates, delayed trains, and messages that say, “Are you free to talk?”
It’s in the way your heart still beats through grief. In the way your chest rises with the breath you didn’t know you were holding.
I used to think silence was strength—that stillness meant control. But now I know: the real strength is in staying. In choosing to feel, even when it burns inside. In facing what scares you instead of drifting through the safest quiet.
The pause button will always be there.
A tempting escape or a getaway.
A soft, dangerous lie.
Now, whenever life weighs me down, I close my eyes, breathe in some air, and stay still.
Because, while having noise and weight on it, life is yet the most beautiful chaos that I could live.
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Writer
Ankita Dey
Intern, Content Writing Department
YSSE