i am becoming

traded texts with a friend tonight. she is trying to conquer the noise and chaos of her days. she is desperately seeking order, and i am just another agent of chaos cluttering her evening. i let the conversation go. i am in another world, altogether. sometimes, it is the quiet that disturbs me most. i stare at a blank sheet of paper for a while. i want to write, but that blank sheet is daunting, and it occurs to me just how inflexible emptiness can be. nothing to draw upon, nothing to work with, nothing to nurture and make my own.

i wonder if sanity breaks if there is too much of it. mine feels like it slips and i sigh.

my mind works furiously to fill in the blank that surrounds me in its vacuum hold. my mind needs something there or it will fake it. i stare at the blank sheet for an hour, then scribble meaningless diagrams and snippets of conversation that never occurred, and then i try for another hour to make sense of what i've done.

i think that quiet is a small thing, about as large as a moment. moments too, should be few and far between. string them together and you find madness. i wrote a week or two ago that i was no longer a man of thunder throwing lightning to the ground, but a man of rain caught up in the downpour of my days. i think that it is not quiet that grows, but that we that shrink.

quiet is a mysterious thing. there is reason, i'm sure, and i suspect it is not buried too deeply. i try not to dig, but i find that to hide from quiet is to bring it with you, and every untended moment it fills. i have spent so much time these last years with quiet that it has saturated me so that i know not that i wear it like a cloak wherever i go. people comment now. they wonder why i am quiet. they think i do not like them, that i am unhappy because i have nothing to say. i suppose so much time alone, i've developed habits. when there is no one to speak them to, you tend to keep your thoughts to yourself.

i write about quiet tonight in a futile attempt to overcome it, to attempt to scrawl a solution to the problem of quiet. it doesn't help and i lose. again. tomorrow i will rise and face it. again.

 

ghost