The Quiet Exit

Any Essay by Chad Schomber

I’ll tell you how it starts. Quietly, with a thought you think is a joke, but it lingers. You’re standing in a room, or maybe at the bottom of the stairs, the way people sometimes pause with a sock half-on. The air is thick with the smell of dust, the fridge hums. There’s that offhand idea that maybe, when the time comes, only a few will notice. Maybe fewer. Maybe nobody at all.

You try to brush it off. Pretend it’s some kind of passing weather. Maybe you make a list in your head. People you know. People who’d miss you. It’s not a long list, but you put your mother on it, maybe a friend or two. There’s always someone. You hope.

The fear doesn’t come on strong. It shows up like mold at the edge of the window, creeping. You remember old neighbors who moved away. Old friends. Their names, now foggy, their houses looking the same except for a different car in the driveway. There was a time you waved to them on trash day. Now you can’t remember if you ever really knew them at all.

You start seeing it everywhere. There’s a mailbox leaning crooked, grass curling up around the post. Bills still show up, even when the person is long gone. The mailman’s the first to notice, or maybe the landlord. Someone with a key. But the rest of the world shrugs and keeps moving.

Most of life is like that. Small ripples, quick to vanish. Someone leaves. Someone doesn’t come back. You check the clock and finish your sandwich. Routine carries you along, the conveyor belt of the everyday. Nobody notices a gear missing until the machine groans or stutters. Usually, it keeps on spinning.

I think about the way people talk at funerals. They speak in threes. Kind. Generous. Quiet. Or maybe, Hardworking. Reliable. Liked a good joke. The stories are tight, well-worn. Not much room for the odd details. Nobody mentions the way the person used to line up their shoes at the door or how they made their coffee, two sugars, every morning, stirring until the spoon clinked the side of the cup twice. You notice those things if you live with someone, but not forever. Memory is patchy. After a while, even the best of us fade into habits and anecdotes, half-remembered, folded away.

Sometimes, I wonder about the stuff left behind. The shoes, the spoon, the faded coat on the hook. These things don’t grieve. They just wait for someone else to claim them or toss them out. It’s almost funny. You could spend years carving a groove into the world, but the world is soft, and it forgets fast. The cushion plumps back up when you get off the couch.

I’ve seen obituaries in the paper, squeezed between car ads and recipes. Some of them are a paragraph. Some just a name, and the years they lived. No details, just dates. I guess there’s a comfort in that, the neatness of it. No mess. Just a clean line. But then, if you blink, you miss it. One more day, one less person.

I’m not afraid of being forgotten by everybody. That’s too big, too abstract. What gnaws is the idea of being missed by almost nobody. That you could slip away and not even tip the scales. Your name carried in a few heads for a while, then gone, like the smell of bread when the bakery closes.

You look at your phone, scroll through the names. Some you haven’t talked to in months. Maybe you tap a name, maybe you don’t. You think about calling, but there’s no real reason. You wonder if anyone thinks to call you. Probably not. Everyone’s busy. The dog needs feeding. The laundry’s piling up.

This isn’t self-pity. Or at least, not entirely. It’s arithmetic. You add up the hours spent with people, the conversations that drift off, the greetings that go unanswered. You realize most connections are loose threads. You can pull away, and the sweater stays mostly intact.

There’s a freedom in that, I guess. You get to see the world up close, unnoticed. The way a bird lands on a branch if it thinks nobody’s watching. You move quietly, listen. People talk to you like you’re nobody in particular. You hear the truth in their voices. No performance. You learn things you wouldn’t if you were someone everyone cared about.

But sometimes, in the hours before the sun comes up, you feel it. That ache. You want someone to notice the small ways you shift the world. The way you adjust or fix the smallest of things. You hope someone, somewhere, will think, “It’s quieter now.” Or, “Something’s missing.” Even if they don’t know it’s you.

I try to make peace with the idea. Most days, I do. I think about the old man who used to sweep the sidewalk in front of the shop. I was just a kid. He never said much. Just swept, every morning, like clockwork. One day he was gone. The sidewalk filled with leaves, wrappers, cigarette butts. After a while, the city sent someone to clean up. People stepped around the mess for a few weeks. Nobody mentioned the man. The shop kept opening, the street kept filling, emptying, filling again. But I remember him. I remember the sound of the broom on concrete. The rhythm of it. Steady. Unremarkable.

Maybe that’s enough. A few people, a handful, holding scraps of you. A memory, a detail, something ordinary. It doesn’t have to be more. The world forgets, but not all at once. You live on in small ways. The coffee can full. The sidewalk swept. Quiet proof you were here, for a while.

I’m still afraid, sometimes. That nobody will notice. But then, on days when the light comes in soft through the curtains and the dust glows gold, I think… maybe being here, even unnoticed, is worth something. The coffee machine belches and you pour your coffee, and you watch the world spin. Not waiting for applause. Just breathing, for as long as you can.

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