By Paige Hoffer

When I leave the house for good, I will take this small, persisting thing with me.


The recording studio is dark, except for the ember of a cigarette which flares red under winding tendrils of smoke. There are no clocks, no windows, no light — only the measured hum of amplifiers, the rolling of tape, and the hollow resonance of instruments and musicians sitting still on metal folding chairs, waiting.

When Mark Hollis walks in, his boots indent the green carpet. He sits at a Wurlitzer piano, his hands hovering over the keys. His left pinky twitches. Then, he plays the first chord. A muted trumpet exhales tentatively from the farthest corner of the room, a sonar ping searching an unfamiliar sea for an echo. The sound is not answered—it sinks, swallowed by the smoke. Hollis presses another chord, soft and hesitant. The note expands into silence. Paul Webb’s bass hums in his hands. Lee Harris grips his sticks loosely, tapping the snare in a steady pulse. The instruments drift past one another, their outlines forming in the fog, moving in bursts, then receding. When the music dissolves into near-nothingness, the hiss of an amp, the creak of a chair, and the weight of waiting stick to the wall like the smell of the smoke. No one moves too suddenly. A last organ note sustains, and the band listens with pleasure until it fades. Hollis exhales. A nod. Smiles across the room. The Spirit of Eden was released in 1988 to no commercial success.

Immediately after hearing it, I send a text.

3:42 PM You should listen to this album. They do the long continuous song thing you like, so I feel like you’d appreciate it. And they recorded it entirely in the dark

At a Party City closing sale, I pick up a bag of small, adhesive rose decals while absently scrolling through podcasts. It will be good to learn something, I think. It would be right to learn something, I know. I push the cart past loose rubber balloons and children’s Halloween costumes in plastic bags. I have to learn something. I select an episode on the deep sea, letting it play as background noise — until the right words hit. The SO-Far channel is like a sound highway — a hidden layer of ocean where sound waves bend back inward, never dissipating, traveling for thousands of miles. I scan my items at a self-checkout kiosk, carrying the bag of roses under my arm, while the sun sets on the parking lot.

At 1:15 AM there is no response to my text. I plug the phone in and lay down.

When I wake up sweating at 3:17 AM, there is still no response.

I’ve never come to the track at this hour before, and night alters something essential about it.  I pictured it last week when friends played frisbee on the now-empty turf where the direction of the track curves into a loop. The usual scent of laundry detergent spilling from the dorm is gone. The dorm itself looks grayer.  In one window, sticky notes form a smiley face left behind by students who moved home for the summer — something sad, small, and persisting.

3:42 AM. In the absence of people, sound, and smell, my senses stretch, unfamiliar and raw.

I straighten my spine, touch my toes, and tug the tongues of my shoes. I walk from the soggy turf to the track, play a song, and start jogging. The ground repeats under my feet — blackness, red synthetic rubber, and harsh flood light.

Another loop. And the song loops. Another loop. Red track, green turf, sharp light. Another loop. Right, left, right, inhale. Another loop. Green turf. Is it getting sharper? Red track. I — Exhale. Tape rolling. Red turf. Green track. The sleeping dorm stares. Inhale. Someone is watching. I breathe in, coughing. I have to stop. I take out my headphones and find — no sound, no smell. I feel alone, really frighteningly alone. When I leave the track, the sky remains just as dark as when I arrived.

The next evening, at a Joanne's Fabrics closing sale, I sit on a metal aisle divider half-filled with office supplies and play another podcast. It drones on and on until a sentence catches me. A sound released into the deep can outlast its source, arriving late, out of sequence.

This phrase strikes me — a little, sexy sentence hiding truth in its aesthetic vagueness. I pick a pen, write it on a sticky note, and smooth it to the linoleum tile with my thumb. I walk out of the store with a bag of expired Big League Chew and forest-green friendship bracelet string.

When I wake up at 3:17 AM again, and there's still no response to my text.

The same feeling, which should not sting as it does. I avoid the track. On the lake trail, I use my music to force my surroundings into shape until the crunching gravel and moonlit water seem to echo back the electric bass of Spirit of Eden.

Talk Talk drifted apart with no blowout fight, no implosion — just a slow unraveling, of a conversation stretching into silence until no one remembered the last thing said. By 1991, after releasing Laughing Stock, they were more idea than band. Paul Webb had left before they started recording. By the time the album was finished, their sound engineer Phil Brown described the sessions as monastic — Hollis working in near darkness, enforcing abstract pauses while the session musicians followed his pretensions in the same painstaking, drawn-out improvisations that initially made them a band. Hollis, eventually exhausted, walked away completely. He released a solo album in 1998, then disappeared entirely, rejecting interviews, refusing nostalgia, choosing silence over dilution. He raised a family while Laughing Stock sold, and sold, and sold.

A flash of light on the trail, then muffled voices beyond my music. I take out an earbud as a running group approaches. One man slows beside me.

Hey, it really isn’t safe to be running this early with music in.

I nod, swallowing. My breath isn’t even. Yeah, um, sorry.

Still catching his breath he looks back at the group, then at me. Why don’t you join us?

I had gone on this run to be moved. Rejecting him doesn’t feel like a real option.

When I join them, I do not listen to music. Is it intentional that they sync their breath? Just by listening, my own breath falls in line with theirs. After a few minutes, something shifts in my body. Every muscle calms. A steadiness takes hold. I get teary but do not wipe my eyes. The only source of light is the stars — just bright enough to remind me that they exist. It’s a surprise how good this run feels. Not a punishment or salve, and I inhale the simple feeling of goodness at the same pace as everyone else.

At the closing sale of a Hobby Lobby, I select gold jewelry wire from a shelf. The SO-Far channel traces my path through aisles of plastic play food, brightly dyed cotton t-shirts, and LED lights. The podcast comes alive: What remains isn’t total absence, but this kind of phantom frequency more felt than heard, moving outward into tributary channels after its source has disappeared.

Tonight, it rains heavily. I take out the materials I had bought aimlessly, and turn on the warm lamplight while water fills the storm drains outside. I pull out animal bones bought from a vintage store, liking the way they look like a frame when arranged inversely.  I frame the bones with the gold jewelry wire, weaving green string into stems and leaves, pressing the rose decals where buds might bloom. When I leave the house for good, I will take this small, persisting thing with me.

I leave the frame to dry and go to bed early, an alarm set to meet the running group in the morning. ■