The TV’s been on since they got home. It’ll still be going when they fall asleep on the couch, sometime after eleven, the remote lost somewhere in the cushions.
They aren’t watching it. Ask what’s on, and they’d have to check. It’s just on, the way it is most nights.
If they explain it at all, they say it’s for the company. Keeping the TV on for company is common, and nobody thinks twice about it. A silent house is hard to sit in, so they fill it, and that’s true as far as it goes. They don’t notice the second thing the noise is doing.
The same sound that makes the empty house bearable is part of what keeps it empty.
A house with voices in it doesn’t feel as empty
It has to be voices. Music doesn’t do it, and the radio doesn’t either, if it’s only songs. Somebody has to be talking. Put a nature documentary on with the sound off, and the room stays exactly as empty as it was. A talk show in the next room, turned low, fixes it.
Some of that is old wiring.
For as long as there have been people, the sound of others talking close by was a sign that things were fine and nobody had to keep watch. A house with talking in it still feels safer than a silent one, even when the talking is coming out of a television set. A show they’ve seen forty times can take the edge off being alone with nobody else in the building, and the shoulders that had been up since they walked in come down a little.
So it was never about what’s on the screen. The room just stops sounding like nobody’s home.
It gives them just enough to stop reaching for more
Loneliness is built to nag, the way hunger nags.
It’s supposed to be annoying enough that a person gets up and does something about it, which usually means picking up the phone or leaving the house.
The TV gets in the way of that. It puts enough company in the room that the nagging quiets down before it turns into anything.
So they don’t call. It isn’t a decision. Nobody sits on the couch weighing the screen against their sister and choosing the screen. It’s more that the screen is already going and doing its job. They think about texting somebody around eight, most nights. Then the next episode autoplays, and the thought just drops, and by the time the credits roll, they’ve forgotten they had it.
The TV is easy to lean on because it never needs anything from them.
After a few months, the regulars on whatever they watch start to feel like people they know, except these ones are never in a bad mood and never call needing a ride to the airport.
It’s the shape of company with the real person scooped out of it. It calms the lonely feeling at night and does nothing for the loneliness underneath.
A person can spend a good warm evening with the TV and go to bed without one real person having known they were alive that day.
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Real company starts to feel like more work than it’s worth
Over a longer stretch, it does something worse.
Real people are a lot of work. They want things, and they have moods, and when they ask how somebody is, they wait around for the real answer instead of the short one.
The TV never does any of that. It’s warm, and it’s there, and it never once asks for anything back, and the longer somebody runs on that kind of company, the more the other kind starts to feel like too much.
A friend texts to say they should catch up sometime. A year ago, that was nothing, a quick yes and a date. Now it sits in the messages for a week, because catching up means turning up somewhere as a whole person with a whole week to account for, and that has somehow become more than they can find the energy for.
Loneliness feeds itself, it turns out.
The more a person pulls in, the harder it gets to climb back out. Stay in long enough, and other people start to look like effort, or like a risk, and the part of them that used to handle all that gets rusty from sitting unused. The television didn’t start any of that. It just makes it comfortable, one night at a time, while the muscle for the real thing wastes away.
Give it a year, and the people who used to ask have mostly stopped asking, and the TV is still right there where it always is.
A screen can’t tell whether anyone’s there
Turning the TV off isn’t the point, and nobody’s saying it is. The comfort is real, and a warm, noisy room after a long day is a good thing to come home to.
It only turns into a problem when it’s the last voice left.
Because the TV can’t tell whether a person is there. It plays to an empty room exactly the way it plays to a full one.
The noise was always standing in for one thing the TV can’t give them: somebody who knows whether they came home tonight, and who cares enough to call when they drop out of sight.
