A sound dies the moment the hands stop.

A foundation is there in the morning, and the morning after that, holding up a thing you can live inside.

I had spent too many years chasing the sound.

I was done with the sound.

What I wanted now was the kind of quiet that does not have to be renewed nightly at anyone’s expense, least of all my own, and I had finally, at great cost, built myself a life that produced it.

That mattered more than any sound a room could make, and it was mine whether anyone clapped or not.