I hate silence.
The word itself is loathsome to my fingertips. It’s a terrible thing, silence-terrible because it’s always there when you don’t want it to be, when you can’t stand it to be, can’t even afford it to be. It’s a betrayer, a liar, a barrier, and a gag stuffed in your mouth-an enemy in all its myriad forms. Silence-that thing that’s more appropriate than screaming, swearing, arguing; more noble than weeping, wailing, groaning, or retching. It’s the thing that stifles expression when you need it most.
The scratching of my pencil on a piece of paper and the clacking of my keyboard are not exactly silent, but for some reason, they qualify. This is the only place that I can do my screaming, swearing, wailing, groaning-provided I’m not making any real noise. Here I can have my fit, as big a fit as I want to have, and the more I retch, the better I feel. I vomit out my screams-long lines of black against this white screen. I spit out curses and let them fly like well-aimed grenades. I sneer and forge ahead with my venting as my little black missiles nail their targets; not one goes awry. I watch as the mental images of my provocateurs suddenly become powerless against me, and I relish the noise I’m making and the damage it’s doing. But still-I’m silent. I sit in my chair, hurt streaming down my face in liquid form, fingers thrashing away too fast for it to be believable that something of value is actually being born, that therapy is taking place…with my mouth locked shut. No one hears me; no one even notices. I am the poster child for decorum; I’m not allowed to be anything else. People shouldn’t be angry, you see; they can’t swear or hate. Whatever it is that I want to say, it’s better that I don’t. Dealing with reality means forgetting reality. Silence. I obey.
Thus, this-this chicken scratch, this spewing of verbiage, this rent portion of all that is me, expressed in the only way permitted. It’s my release, my counter-attack, my freedom. It’s truth and reality. Whoever heard of an ink-and-paper pistol, you ask. Ask those who write. We do it because we have to; there is no other way. Short of being arrested for physical assault, this is our Plan B. We fabricate this mirror so that we can see ourselves clearly, and from there we know what to do. We see, we strike, and we get our sanity back. We return to life behind a façade, carrying the story of bloodshed-both theirs and ours-with us in secret. And the thing we covered with our silence becomes a “was” instead of an “is”-because we wrote it out of its quiet existence.
I write because it’s the best I can do in this silence.