silence
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the shit show. I hope everyone is doing well and taking care of themselves. January is such a brutal month. I appreciate you stopping by to read my words. I know you are all busy and it can be hard to find time to do anything, but you are here and I thank you for that.
Do you know that feeling when you plug your ears and put your head under the shower faucet? When the ski lift stops? When you turn off the music and realize the silence?
I want to trace back this feeling. Bear with me.
I remember sitting on the dirty, cold gymnasium floor every Monday morning for six years. The things we do to kids to teach them nothing at all. My back always hurt, so I’d end up laying down. It’s amazing, I don’t remember the lectures, but I remember the floor.
Monday through Friday I would sit in math class with my left leg bouncing ceaselessly. The teacher would tell me to stop because I was distracting others. My right leg would start up as soon as the teacher continued the lesson. I could never do math, so I rarely tried. It was always a matter of trying to find the right classmate to ask for homework answers. To ensure I wasn’t too much of a pest to any one classmate, I would shuffle between a cast of three or four per week. The teachers loved me because I made them laugh and their job sucked so bad that anything was better than nothing. The teachers hated me because I refused to try to learn any math at all. It was like a foreign language to me and still is. Now, I do math in my head at night to help me fall asleep. It quiets my brain because it takes all of me just to remember the numerical sequences, what part of the equation I’m on, basic division and multiplication. Carry the 2. Can you even carry a 2? Shit, I’m lost again. That’s silence. Silence from tension.
Now, I walk down the Montreal streets alone in the snow listening to silence. Snow silence is different. There’s a certain intimacy in it. I almost exclusively listen to extreme music these days. If the vocalist is singing, I want him screaming. I skip the stratum of composition, cut to the noise. If the songs I listen to had topography, it would be the Venezuelan table-top mountains: monolithic, but eventual and final. That’s silence. Above those clouds.
Back to the gym floor. Different now, I lay on the floor of the McGill gym staring at the ceiling. This is my break. I’m in the place of productivity, where New Year's resolutions are met with the reality of burning lungs and sweaty hands. I come here to think, I think. I’m supposed to be working on my abs, but here I am laying on the mat, looking at nothing, thinking about nothing. They blast the worst music in the gym. Imagine a Bar Mitzvah in hell. I wear my headphones and play metal or punk or something so loud it's quiet. That’s close to silence, we’re getting there.
In the locker room, I sit and stare at the locker door. I’m alone for the first time in weeks. Silence.
When I go home there’s noise. It’s good noise usually, but still noise. I can’t find silence, not even at night. My fan blows nothing nowhere just to simulate silence. I can’t sleep in silence, so I listen to a man narrate scary stories. That’s as close as I can get.
When I was still in high school, my mom would feed my siblings, my dad, and me dinner every night. We’d thank her, help her clean up, and head upstairs to bed. It’s a simple routine, but it was built on love and her hard work, always taken for granted. Sometimes I would come back downstairs after dinner to talk with mom or grab something I had forgotten or pet my dog. Every time I would come downstairs at this time I’d find mom standing five feet from the small television in the kitchen holding at least one of my pets. Music would be playing out of the house speakers, usually Dave Matthews or Coldplay or something, and the television audio would be on full blast. Guy Fieri or the House Hunters lady filled the whole downstairs with senseless noise, noiseless noise. For mom, that’s silence. It drove me crazy to no end, but she deserves silence, or at least her version of it.
I remember the feeling of being tackled for the first time playing football. I was on the offensive line, so rarely would tackling be in the conversation for me, but on occasion the coach would have me play running back or tight end or something just to see what I was capable of. At some point I was passed, likely handed, the ball and I ran because that’s what you do. I made it maybe twenty yards before I felt the impact. It didn’t hurt really. It felt natural, like an answer, you know? We hit the ground hard and I still felt no pain. The linebacker’s face was now directly in front of mine and he was on top of me. Our face masks were interlocked and briefly I knew him better than anyone else in the world. I felt his breath on my face. I still can. The sounds of the scrimmage reduced to a low end rumble like in the movies. It was just us, there. That’s the kind of silence only possible amidst chaos.
I’m talking about silence because I miss it so much. I wear my noise canceling earbuds almost all of the time. I think often about anechoic chambers. They say it’s so quiet in there that you can hear your blood circulating throughout your body. I want to tense my muscles and listen to the blood flow. I want to take a deep breath, exhale and hear the air stop. Most of all, though, I want to believe that somewhere there exists true silence. Anechoic chambers may be the quietest places in the world, but they’re said to be loud in new ways. I need the real deal. Not forever, just for an hour.
I was told it’s not normal to think about horrible things all the time. I doubt everything. If you don’t tell me you love me, I assume you hate me. If you tell me you love me, I wonder why. I can’t stop questioning answers. It’s not skepticism, it’s destruction. Ask me what I believe and I will tell you nothing. Nothing I do should be replicated. Learn nothing from this. All I can hope is that some day I will be forgotten. Presence is a curse. Stop having children, they didn’t ask for this. I’m sorry I’m being negative, it’s just that everything is so loud. Give me silence and I will fill it with noise. We cannot know things in themselves, we can only know things through our senses. What a curse, to live in this world of forms. It’s a trick of the light. How am I expected to text you back when I’m eight seconds from ego death. I’m swimming through snow. It’s all melting, turning gray, all mush, and our best days are behind us.