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Wrapped in Silence

Chris 1 Comment

As you sit in your bedroom, legs extended toward the foot of the bed and your back leaning against the wall, you can feel the heavy weight in your heart beat against your chest. It beats arrhythmically, out of tune with your heart and the pumping blood that courses through your body.

The weight is silence. The silence of the quiet thump of your heart and the rushing of blood in your ears. The silence of thousands of synapses firing as wild, uncontrolled thoughts tumble through your mind without leaving more than a faint trail that is wiped away by the same winds that give them agency. The silence of love unspoken and bitter last words that can never be reclaimed. A silence so complete that you can feel your voice, the voice with which you narrate your existence and that gives you a sense of self, fade and crumble in its face.

Outside, there is a similar weight pressing inward. It works its way through the blanket that wraps your legs and the sweatshirt you wear until it nestles against your skin like an itch you can never quite find, no matter how long you scratch.

This weight is also silence, but a separate silence. The silence of a fan blowing in the background, a constant whir that never ceases or varies in any perceptible way. The silence of an apartment full of people who are all busy with quiet things. The silence of a nearby highway humming with the steady stream of cars full of people who make their way from one place to another without ever conceiving of you as a being with your own hopes, dreams, and thoughts.

Some people, somewhere in your building, make a small noise that you know exists, but it is not strong enough to make its way through the walls and plaster that guard your apartment against their intrusion. The few people who, passing in their cars, look in your direction cannot see you for the brick and aluminum that guard the outside of your building against intrusion.

The two weights press against each other, pulled to each and yet repulsed by each other, constantly trying to escape from the other in one direction while being pulled toward it in the opposite direction. As the ebb and flow of their tugging begins to tear you apart, you quiet your mind and lay aside all of the rambling, rumbling thoughts that tumble through your mind.

This new silence, the silence of the mind after a long day; the silence of the mind when all thought has come to naught; the silence that reigns over the darkest moments of humanity; the silence that lifts up and glorifies the brightest moments of our lives and the lives of those we love; this silence settles into your mind.

As you sit and feel the power of this new, third silence, you let it flow out of you. It sweeps down to your heart and pulls the first silence with it. It glides outward then, capturing the second silence in its grasp and slowly wraps Silence around you, embracing you with a blanket devoid of warmth but resplendent with comfort. It pulls and tugs until not a scrap of you is left uncovered and slowly settles until you can feel it seep into your very bones. It takes such a hold of you that you are left wondering if there ever was something other than silence in your life; you wonder if have ever had a voice or heard a sound or if it was all a dream from which you have woken.

You feel the muscles in your chest expand and contract as you breath. You feel the muscles in your throat prepare the way for the word that will shatter the silence. You feel your tongue curl and move so that, as the vibrating air passes, it will make the correct sequence of sounds that will forever destroy this heavy, peaceful silence. As it builds, you can feel it coming, you can feel an end to everything you’ve ever know coming on the crest of this wave.

And then your muscles relax and the moment is passed. As your breath keeps its place in the first silence, your throat keeps its place in the second silence, and your tongue keeps its place in the third silence, you feel a fourth silence settle over them all. With this silence, the silence of the word unspoken, you feel the warmth that was lacking settle into you, the comfort is no longer cold and strange but familiar in a way that you cannot comprehend but wish to never be without again.

 

Late-Night Writing

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When midnight approaches
And exhaustion encroaches
I make a silent wish:
Just one more late-night hour
To write and feel the power
I have when I create.

A mind full of thick fog
Permeates my daily slog
When I choose to stay up.
Better fog than the loss
I feel as I turn and toss
When I instead choose sleep.

Second shift and spare time
Is never enough to climb
The mountain before me.
I just want to explore
Writing in a time before
I’m bidding friends good night

So for now I contend
With foggy days that descend
From my late-night writing,
All while hoping someday
I will be able to say
I spend my days writing.

A Day in the Life of a Twenty-Something

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You wake up at a variety of times on any given day, but you went to bed early yesterday and slept until 9. With over 9 hours of sleep, you feel more refreshed and ready than you’ve felt in weeks. Your back kind of aches, but you know it’s a sign that you slept well and it’ll eventually disappear when you can afford a new mattress. Specifically, a mattress that wasn’t bought of the cheap end of the discount rack. Content that your morning will be quiet, you grab you phone off of your nightstand and review the notifications.

A few texts from your friends who wake up early or stay up late, the usual plethora of social media updates, and a message from your parents about Christmas plans are all that great you. No application updates happened over night and none of your passive games have anything to report. You set your phone aside for a moment to rub your eyes  and turn on your lamp. After you eyes have lost some of their crusty feeling, you open the social media account of your choice, looking for updates from friends or the latest news on your interests.

Instead, all you can find is people screaming out about the latest tragedy perpetrated by your government. Maybe there’s some news about the latest disaster to happen exactly as the protesters predicted it would and the corporations swore it wouldn’t. Perhaps there is some heartening news about the investigations into corruption at the highest levels of your government, but that is almost always tempered by the commentary from a few trusted analysts that there has been solid enough evidence to prosecute for months now and the ruling party has so far refused to do so. Instead, the heads of your government are intent on pushing laws through the legislative bodies without giving anyone a chance to read them or without even fully understanding them. Gone are the days of your childhood, when it seemed like everyone worked together to do the right thing. The stories your parents told you of sensibility, logic, and justice ruling at the end of the day are no longer relevant. Now, everything is “us or them” and no one is willing to reach across the aisle to actually try to understand.

You close your social media application without ever looking up your friends or for developments in your hobbies or interests. Instead, you put your phone aside and open a book, play a video game, or fire up Netflix. You disengage not because you don’t care, but because you care and there’s too much for you to care about. Ten minutes of browsing has left you almost as tired as you were the night before. At least you managed to avoid finding any articles written by previous generations about how your generation has ruined the country or will soon ruin it. That much irony in the morning isn’t good for anyone’s health.

After a suitable amount of time, you finally haul yourself to your feet and start getting ready for the day. Some kind of food is consumed, nothing terribly interesting but enough to keep your body functioning, and the usual hygiene routines are observed. Perhaps a little more quickly than you would like, but water is a finite resource and not free. Neither is the electricity used to heat your water or power your stove. After you’ve finished the more pleasant parts of your day, you clench your jaw and make yourself attend to your bills. It is early in the month, and most of them come due over the next two weeks, carefully staggered so you can make sure they all post to your account before the next one is due. It wouldn’t be good to get overdrawn again. Once a year is more than enough.

Bills paid, almost happily because it means you’ve got more than enough money to pay them all sitting in your account, you start reviewing your Christmas gift list. You’d like to buy presents for a lot of people, but you’re not sure you can afford to. If you bought everything from Amazon, you probably could, but you just read an article the night before about how the warehouse employees are collapsing on the job and that the CEO finally passed the 100 billions net-worth mark. The idea of that much difference between the people who actually do the work for a company and the person who sits on the top of the human pyramid sickens you.

You still buy several gifts from Amazon, though, as you go about acquiring Christmas presents. There’s just nowhere else that can get them to you in time, much less actually has what you want. Most places that might have been able to do that at one point have buckled under Amazon’s greater financial weight. Just like the local post office that’s been marking packages as delivered because they don’t have the staff to deliver everything on Amazon’s promised day. They need to cheat so that they’re not penalized for failing to make good on the contracts their superiors have signed with the cross-industry giant that is Amazon.

Christmas attended to, you settle in for the remainder of your evening, alternating between reading, watching TV, or maybe attending to a creative project or two. Even though you’ve made effort to avoid it for just one day, the raging inferno of inequality and corruption has leaked into your life through your friends and through the constant awareness that you are a part of the industrial machine driving your country and your world toward ruin. The only way you could avoid being a part of it is by abandoning modern life entirely and taking up life as a sustenance farmer.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that, as appealing as it sounds at times. Your debt, accrued at the behest of your parents, older relatives, and role models, must be paid back. If it is not paid back by you, then it will burden your parents who, while much better off than you, are still trying to get their financial future back in order after the bubble burst last decade. You know what its like to feel the weight of that debt hanging around your neck, changing the way you make every decision. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Instead, you eat a quiet dinner of something simple and filling, go back to your Netflix subscription and watch it until you feel sufficiently removed from your problems to go to bed. After preparing for bed, you lay back and feel the steel springs shift and twang as you stir beneath the covers. Eventually, you fall asleep after consoling yourself with the thought that maybe tomorrow will be better.

Broken Words (My Self-Titled Post)

Chris 1 Comment

I’ve had this blog for over a year now, and I’ve never shared the poem that inspired the title. I think I’ve talked about it in the past, and I definitely remember writing about posting it eventually, but I figured that would be a good way to start my year of daily posts. And a way to solidify Friday as “Poetry Day” for my blog. So, here it is, without further introduction or preamble:

 

“Broken Words”

What point are there in words,
Hear how sweetly they sing,
When they fail to tell a tale
And no understanding bring?

What point are there in words,
So full of heart and love,
When they can be cast away
and easily disposed of?

What point are there in words,
So full of awe and wonder,
When they fall upon empty heads
And lose their flash and thunder?

What power is there in words,
Only so much empty wind,
That tumble out so carelessly
Like peels from an apple skinned?

What power is there in words,
Nothing more than empty lies,
That I will use to quiet
The tears that fall from your eyes?

What power is there in words,
Such simple seeming sounds,
That form the bones of our speech:
Verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and nouns?

What use have I for words,
Such lovely, crafted things,
When no one quite hears them
Despite their melodic rings?

What use have I for words,
So beautiful and bright,
When they cannot illuminate
Or show anyone the light?

What use have I for words,
So difficult and simple,
That cannot change a heart
Or cause an iron will to dimple?

What words have I to use,
A lexicon at my fingers,
To tell you of the thought
That cannot stay but lingers?

What words have I to use.
So many different choices,
To make you hear inside my head
The many clamoring voices?

What words have I to use,
So many and yet so few,
To make you understand
What I’m saying to you?

What point have I to make,
Flimsy as a tin foil,
That cannot be made by action
And take far less care and toil?

What point have I to make,
Nothing sharper than a spade,
When all the words are dead
And all their parts are played?

What point have I to make,
Swift and small as a pin,
That can pierce the patchwork
Armor that you wear within?

What power have I to take,
To steal so quick and sly,
Your mind and heart away
And leave you with a sigh?

What power have I to take,
Remove with nary a sound,
The echoes of your dreams
That hold you to the ground?

What power have I to take,
To shatter beyond repair,
What you thought you knew
And all that you hold dear?

What words are left to say,
To mumble murmur and mutter,
That will leave my thin mouth
Without a drawn out stutter?

What words are left to say,
Hollow sounds of passing air,
That will show you what I see
And teach you how I care?

What words are left to say,
Gurgle grumble and weep,
To convince you of the truth
That I, within me, keep?

What words of point and power,
To take and make and play,
Can I use to convince you
Of the truth of what I say?

The words of power that make,
The words of point that take,
No matter what one may say,
If you use these words,

they break.

 

Rain Storm

Chris 1 Comment

I am relaxing on my bed, right arm tucked behind pillows that support my head and left leg crossed over right. My toes, freed from their normal cotton restraints, idly fidget in the cold wind that blows through my apartment. In my free hand, I hold a book over my head so that, should I begin to doze, I will not sleep for long. A book to the face is enough to wake most anyone.

I stir as the wind picks up, the unseasonable chill it carries into the beginning of summer deepening. It convinces me to wrap my lower legs and feet in a blanket. A chill breeze is easy to ignore. The seeping cold is not. My nose grows cold and I occasionally wish for a light blanket for my upper body as well, but not enough to pull myself away from this place of peace and relaxation.

I begin to doze every page or so. At one point, I miss my face and my doze extends into a short nap. It would have been a long nap if not for the flecks of icy water that splattered on my elbow. I wake, some five minutes after my nap began, almost an hour after I cease to notice the world around me, to find the rain sheeting down outside my window. The cold gusts that had been pushing through my apartment now carried rain with them, as far as my bed. It is unexpected. The forecasts called for clouds and wind, no rain.

I rouse myself from my stupor, propping myself up on my elbows so I can nudge the window, closing it to about a quarter of its full capacity. After fumbling for my bookmark and putting my book on my bedside table, I lay back again. I breath deeply of the damp heady aroma of mixed rain and churned dirt that flows in through my window and think of nothing as I stare into the sky. My peace grows as I let my senses embrace this rain.

Two minutes in, I am roused by the familiar anxiety of every unexpected storm. I rise from my bed and trek into the main room. There are no raindrops on the window screen and half the small porch beyond it is still dry. My couch is safe unless the wind changes. I stand and watch the waves of rain cascade through the parking lot, hammering the puddles that never seem to disappear these days and making me glad I no longer live at the bottom of a hill.

I retire to my room again and find the playlist I’d created not even a week ago. I turn it on and let the five songs that remind me of the calmness and relaxation I only truly feel during rain storms play through the speakers of my small stereo. I take my place back on my bed, but leave my book on the nightstand. This time, I do not begin to doze. This time, I stay and breath in the rain as it falls, wishing I had a proper porch on which I could watch it. After a few minutes, I no longer desire it. I am content to recline on my bed and let it play itself out as I experience it through my window.

It takes only half an hour. Longer than other storms I’ve seen this month, but still nowhere near as long as I would like it to be. My playlist has only made it halfway through its second rotation. The rain leaves me behind with nothing but the damp, acrid scent of a small woods holding onto the humidity that it has acquired. This humidity is released slowly. Even when I climb into my car for work the following morning, it will still be there, making the whole area feel almost like a chilly sauna.

But tonight, as I drift off to sleep, the churned earth and plant matter scent of the rain and forest will keep me company. I return to my book and sigh contentedly, no longer focused on the storm’s end. It will be there in a few hours, when I need it. Tonight, I will sleep well.