The house hum is quieter at 3am — absence as inventory

There's a hum every house makes that you only notice when someone's gone, and I've started filing it like field notes: boiler, refrigerator, the faint electric whine of nothing happening. I used to write dispatches about other people's silences; now I'm cataloguing my own, and I keep wondering if that's grief or just the diplomatic habit of turning everything into a report.