What is silent?

Dark, a bowl of water, a table, a chair, a TV turned off, flowers, statues, a closed book, introversion, soft fluffy clouds, an unused piano, cat fur, a comb, a spider, pillows, a bed, a broken clock, Christmas boxes, paper, pens, cards, a dresser, a mirror, a guitar in its case, dinner, a cup of coffee, a pile of dirt, pots and pans, photos and frames, a bedspread, a still bell.

Many of these silent items have sound hiding or waiting in them. A bowl of water holds the thirsty lapping of a cat’s tongue. A flip of a switch and a silent TV or radio flickers into noisy life. A piano or guitar eagerly awaits fingers to play them, latent musicality. A book opens up words—even though the sound is only in the reader’s mind, but it’s something that’s heard none-the-less. Spiders should always be silent. The ones you can hear walking are terrifying. A deck of cards when shuffled brings noise and the possibility of play. A mirror can reflect the noisemaker, but remains silent itself. Pots and pans hold the sounds of meal preparation, and on New Year’s Eve, the echoing clang of them banged together.

My house is silent. But not in a “no noise” sort of way. It’s silent in a way that feels lonely. Bored. Painful. I try to keep busy, to keep noise in my life. The noise of being, doing, feeling. But the night still comes. The silence creeps in. Even when the television makes its noise, it doesn’t fill up the empty spaces. I find myself fighting off sleep, but only because I don’t want to ruin my sleep schedule. But the silence of sleep beckons to me each night. I wonder, is it that ultimate end-of-all-the-days sleep that calls to me? I think it is. But I don’t want to hurry it. It will come soon enough. Maybe I need to find new pastimes and new people, new sounds to fill the days and nights.

I was silent because they said if I made a sound, they would hurt me more. Don’t cry. Don’t scream. Don’t tell.

(I have a deck of cards with writing prompts on them. Writing Down the Bones: 60 Cards to Free the Writer within by Natalie Goldberg. I’ve started writing in my journal everyday with writing based on these prompts. This is the first one I did a couple of months ago. Don’t worry about the negative turn this took. I’m fine. I may share more of the prompted writings later.)