Sedatephobia – Jason Hayes
Coming home never used to be a struggle for Jason Hayes because he had never come home to the stillness and the silence that he now came home too because his house was empty. The silence was overwhelming especially in the small hours of the night when sleep did not come easily, and the other side of the bed was empty and cold, void of the life he once knew.
Jason wondered if he would ever get used to coming home to the empty silence that greeted him but then he often thought that he never would want to get used to it because that meant a kind of acceptance that he was not ready for and was not sure that he would ever be ready for. A kind of acceptance that meant his home life was now empty and silent, and that he was stuck, that he was alone.
Jason could not begrudge his children for moving on, for becoming adults, just as he could not begrudge his brothers for having lives of their own that were moving forward, but he missed them, missed the sound of his children in the house and the joy that they got from seeing him walk in through the door, and he missed his brothers even though he spent an insane amount of time with them on base or during spin ups and deployments. Most of all he missed the company that he had become so used to relying on even when he did not take advantage of it; it was somewhat surreal to think that all of those mundane things that he took for granted, he now missed as much as he did.
His home was no longer a home, somehow it had been transformed back into nothing more than a house for him to come and go. They say 'home is where the heart is' and Jason had never understood that until now because his heart was split in so many ways – with Emma, with Mikey, with Alana, and with his brothers.
The fear of silence, some would say, had always been engrained in Jason because silence never meant that things were good. Jason had been trained by the universe to need some sort of noise constantly. Silence in the battlefield went one of two ways – the enemy no longer stood or the enemy was planning their next move by trying to lull a solider into a false sense of security or lure them out. Silence at home could mean many things but in his experience it meant that someone was up to no good, or trouble, or was struggling with something, especially when it came to the men on his team. So silence was engrained to be feared for Jason, and that was a fear he could never get over.