Thought #4

On Silence

Do you understand how many emotions pass through our silence?

The whirring fan, Nine Inch Nails and probably the tapping of the keyboard are the loudest sounds I hear once I am home from work.

I wish I could play the drums. Maybe my heartbeat would have some rhythm when the drumsticks meet their thumps.

I never thought there would be a day when I’d try to be stoic, because I never believed in indifference and the lack of emotions, even as a façade.

I write—and perhaps I write not because I am any good, but because writing is my best friend. I can be me right here. But sometimes, it is scary to write publicly—to lay yourself naked to people you don’t know and who can see the most vulnerable of you.

Intimacy with strangers—and this intimacy is perhaps more sacred and more profound than one I have ever known.

Silence—is so many other things. The one thing it isn’t, is empty.

Sometimes you could hear white noise and find silence in that, just the way sometimes my friend finds silence in drinks. I find silence in a darkness that beckons me and sometimes when I stand at the cusp of eternal light.

I never took myself as an actor of two worlds and somehow, now there is a protagonist in both. The stories play out well—gripping (if nothing else!); but does anyone ask what happens to the protagonist? Which world is hers?

Does she exist?

Or is she like the silence—unheard, but profound?