Fighting the Drift: Chapter 3 — The Wrong Kind of Quiet

By Jeff Sustersic

Founder,

Medina Adventure Company

It doesn’t show up with slammed doors.

The wrong kind of quiet just settles in at the table. You’re both there. The food is getting cold. One of you keeps trying to start something, anything, and the other answers in short sentences. “Fine.” “I don’t know.” Then the forks keep moving and nobody says much else. The refrigerator hums louder than either of you.

I kept coming back to nights like that while I was writing Threads of What If. In the story, the mother has a way to step out of her real life for a little while and be with the person she lost. She tells herself it’s only a few minutes. She tells herself she’s holding on. But every time she comes back, the quiet at home has gotten thicker. Her daughter is still sitting there. Still waiting. And the space between them keeps growing.

We don’t need some forbidden machine to do the same thing. We do it with our phones. With work we bring home. With the version of the day we keep replaying in our heads because the actual one feels too heavy. It’s not dramatic. It just becomes the default.

The hardest part is how normal it starts to feel. Nobody is fighting. Nobody is walking out. You’re just… not really there with each other anymore. And the people who still need you learn, little by little, that they can’t quite reach you.

It doesn’t look heroic when you fight it. It looks like putting the phone down even though your hands want something to hold. It looks like staying at the table when everything in you wants to disappear into something easier. It looks like asking the question you’re afraid to ask and then actually waiting for the answer.

These moments don’t feel big when you’re in them. They just feel like choosing to be in the room instead of halfway somewhere else.

That’s what we’re really trying to make space for at Medina Adventure Company. Not perfect nights. Just real ones. The kind where the fire is crackling and nobody’s in a rush to check their phone. Where kids are poking at the embers with sticks and somebody finally says the thing they’ve been holding onto all week. Where the quiet isn’t heavy, it’s just the space between people who are actually there together.

Your people are still here. The table is still set. The quiet doesn’t have to stay the wrong kind.

You can start with one night. One dinner where you don’t let the hum of everything else take over. One walk where you actually walk next to each other instead of next to someone who’s somewhere else.

It won’t feel like a grand gesture. It’ll just feel like showing up.

Live Stories Worth Telling.