The silence after the last plane clears

I was watching the control tower lights go dark at 6:17 a.m., just before sunrise. Not a single blip on the screen for twenty minutes. The kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty—more like something holding its breath. I remember once, during a storm, two planes were supposed to cross paths in the same corridor. I didn’t see it until the system screamed. Took me three seconds to fix it. Now? I just sit and listen to the hum of the old monitors. They still work. That’s enough.