Saturday, June 30, 2012

Shhh quiet please!

Can you tiptoe through a garden? Will the dew stick to your toes? Can you whisper walk, swish and sway and not disturb the creatures?

The silence it is golden....or so it is written. It catches in the back of my throat. Silence can be so loud, so sad, so lost. It rolls in with the darkness and the fear. I can taste it, touch it... it wraps its arms around me. I need the sounds, the daily toll of noise.

I like to hear their voices, the television, anything. Before not so much. I would bite off hush with clenched teeth. Turn the t.v. down! Stop fighting! Chomp, chomp I would eat the noise until it was all gone. It was all more then I could stand. I would drive in the car, windows up, radio off. Needing the silence.

That was before. Before the silence of him. Before not hearing a sound put an abnormal noise in my head. When you search for something, something, eventually you have to make it up. A dark sound of emptiness, a deep throated cry that sadly was no ones but my own. Then back to the lack of it all. The lack of breath, the lack of life, the lack of understanding.

Can sound create pathways? My ears pick it all up so quickly. I do not sleep, instead drifting on a wave of sounds. Thinking of Frost and nature, poetry in sound, pain in silence.

We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace..
and fixity in our joys and aquire a listening air...

 I never saw him open his eyes or heard him cry a cry... Now I wait for those sounds so desperatly... wake up little one I sometimes wish even as I cry out in pure exhaustion. Silence warps into death and memories that are all too loud within my mind.

3 comments:

  1. I get that. I used to love the peace and quiet.Now it invites sadness and bad thoughts, it is so much louder than the noise.

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  2. So beautifully written. Silence can have so many qualities, strange that we lump all of those 'lack of noises' together under the same label really. Now, I find it can be peaceful but yes, also so loud, sad and lost.

    I open my mouth to chomp, chomp, chomp but then I remember. How silent silence can be? How I would rather have screaming than silence.

    A listening air perhaps? After the screams and TV and fighting have gone. My ears strain from the sides of my head. Waiting for . . .something.

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  3. I'll never forget how quiet everyone was in the house after the funeral... why? There was no baby to wake with loud noises...

    And later, when John and I had gone to bed, the sound of laughter from a handful of people who had had too much to drink... How could there be laughter on the day my son was buried?

    And then waking up the next morning to silence. Grim, naked, bare silence. I should have been woken to his cries.

    However difficult it is with a newborn, I am grateful every single time he cries - because the silence? That deafening silence - it's infinitely worse.

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