The first entry was written in Esme’s spidery script, the ink a faded sepia. *Situationship: The state of the house, which is no longer a home but a series of rooms we co-inhabit. The hallway no longer connects the kitchen to the living room, but accesses a memory of a Tuesday afternoon from last year. The front door sometimes opens onto the sea, though we are miles from the coast.*
It had been four hundred and twelve days since they had last spoken a full sentence to one another. The silence had coalesced, gaining weight and texture, until it began to warp the world around them. The Glossary was Roan’s idea, a way to catalogue the impossibilities, to give names to the quiet calamities. It was the only thing they collaborated on anymore.
Yesterday, Esme had added a new term. *Quiet Quitting: The way the garden has stopped trying. The roses do not die, but they have forgotten their scent. The tomatoes remain green and hard on the vine, refusing to ripen. The lawn does not grow. It is a passive resistance to the sun.* She had felt it in her own hands, the way the wool she spun no longer held its twist, falling limp and useless from the spindle. A corresponding lack of effort in the world’s very fibre.
Roan was prone to a different kind of manifestation, one he was in the throes of now. She found him in the pantry, crouched in the dark, chewing on a desiccated orange peel. His hair was matted, his eyes wide and feral in the sliver of light from the door. She retreated, fetched the Glossary, and opened it to a new page. *Goblin Mode: A retreat into the small, the dark, the unappealing. A state of pure, unselfconscious id. Characterised by a diet of dry pasta, wilting vegetables, and a deep aversion to sunlight. Not to be disturbed.*
Their days were measured by these small horrors. Sometimes a *Vibe Shift* would ripple through the cottage; the warm, sunlit air of the kitchen would suddenly turn cold and grey, smelling of damp stone and regret, for no reason at all. It was as if the room itself was having a sudden, depressive episode.
Other times, Roan would be seized by a fit of *Main Character Energy*. During these episodes, physics would bend to his will. If he dropped a cup, it would freeze an inch from the floor, waiting for him to decide its fate. The single beam of afternoon sun would detach from the window and follow him from room to room like a spotlight, leaving Esme in perpetual shadow. In these moments, she felt like a secondary character in the tragedy of her own life.
The worst, for Esme, was the *Gaslighting*, a phenomenon that eroded her sanity more than any other. “The grandfather clock has always stood in the bathroom, love,” Roan had murmured last week, his first semi-direct address in months. But she knew it hadn’t. She had a searing memory of dusting its mahogany case in the foyer that very morning. Yet there it was, ticking solemnly beside the clawfoot tub, its pendulum swinging in the steam. The house conspired with him, the floorboards showing no sign of it ever being moved.
Roan had his own delusions. He’d stand at the window, gazing at the sullen, colourless plants. “It’s a new phase for the garden,” he’d write in the Glossary under the heading *Delulu*. “A minimalist bloom. It’s more beautiful this way, if you really look.” And Esme, watching the hope flicker in his eyes, almost believed him. These were the Eras they lived in: The Era of Perpetual Twilight, The Era of Mismatched Socks, The Era of Unexplained Dampness. Each had its own entry.
She remembered a time before the Glossary, a ghost of a memory that felt warm and sharp. She remembered his easy charm, the way he could talk the postman into leaving a package without a signature, the way he’d made her laugh in a silent library. She thought of adding an entry for it—*Rizz: The spectral energy of a former charisma, now detectable only as a faint warmth on his old coat, or a lingering echo in a room he has just left*—but it felt too cruel.
Even small, mundane things had become weaponised. The way he scraped his fork against his teeth sent a jolt of visceral disgust through her, so potent it made the milk curdle on the counter. She’d logged it grimly. *Ick: A sudden, inexplicable wave of revulsion triggered by a minor, previously unnoticed habit. Manifests as a physical force, capable of cracking porcelain.*
That evening, Esme wrote the final entry on the last page of the thick, leather-bound book. She looked over the pages, a lexicon of their shared decay. *Unpack: The stated purpose of this Glossary. To name, to define, and to understand the geography of our silence. Status: Complete.*
She closed the book. The air in the cottage was still, heavy with the weight of every defined and catalogued misery. Nothing had changed. The naming had not fixed them. It had only given their brokenness a vocabulary.
She sat opposite Roan at the scarred wooden table. The Glossary lay between them. He looked up from his contemplation of a salt shaker, his eyes meeting hers for the first time in what felt like an eternity. The silence that stretched between them now was different. It was not the muffled, suffocating silence of before. It was a clean, sharp, terrifying silence. The silence of a blank page.
Esme took her pen. She turned the book over and, on the inside of the back cover, she wrote a single, new word. A word that had not been trending, a word that had no place in their encyclopaedia of sorrows. She did not write a definition. She simply pushed the book across the table towards him.
The pen lay beside it. The silence waited.
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