There is a sound of silence. It varies. This is not a groundbreaking discovery. It is my personal reconciliation with the truth.
I always drown out silence with music. I have at the cost of my eardrums, curated playlists that can elevate me into a very precise state of mind. Playlists based on specific beats per minute and adjusted volumes to replace the silence at a frequency it presents itself at. There is a sad silence, a frequency louder than you would predict. It requires the indulging of minor chords, sometimes sharp, piercing through the silence in a manner that is disruptive, a strength required to shift you from the height of silence to the baseline of normalcy.
The word normalcy is an ironic one to use in this context, as I find myself observing silence because of how numbing and neutralising it is this evening. This silence was birthed from shock, the result of a pin held to a bubble that I let myself sit into for the avoidance of disappointment. This shock stemmed from someone’s idea of normalcy.
Today’s menu serves the silence of discomfort. This is silence that is layered with images and moments, calling back to every experience I have had and everything that I know. There also is silence in the truth that the earth carries every time it spins at a fixed point, at every point it spins around the vast space of time.
There is another silence, a very particular, comforting silence, that I am unbeknownst to, in the fabric of privilege. It is a silence that requires stillness, one that exists in the absence of disruption. It is a reminder of a state of being that has passed between generations over the bundles of time that we have survived through as a species.
The type of silence that is painted in black and white, and shudders at the threat of a splash of colour. It is silence that is afraid of being broken by protest. It is precisely calculated, and hyper aware of being deformed by volume. It is dependent on the invisibility of its own state and forced visibility of everything it represents. It is one that I have not had the silence to consume, and has led me to familiarise myself with every other harshness of silence there is. A silence that is missing but that should not exist. But it does, and it keeps many unlike me at peace in their homes. There is a call to disrupt this silence, there is loudness and noise in the streets that overpowers it, there is recognition that this silence is like poison, it only allows those who can receive this silence and experience it, to exist.