Longing for silence

If there is one thing I long for deeply then it is something that lies between silence and stillness. Slow down world, I cannot keep up. What I thought about yesterday feels like it has been a decade ago today - but equally so it has only ripened for the span of a second. The age of harvesting green plums. Glossy but bitter, shapely but indigestible.

The silence I long for has a face, silky and even like a millpond at dawn before the wind awakens. When stillness makes it impossible to tell the real from its reflection - where merely the seam of the shoreline gives it away. A scene of the not yet, but still. The unrevealed but hovering. Balanced proportions not to console the eye but to place truth on a line in between.

But more often I walk through silence edged into a doorframe of expense or affordance. This one can cover mouths, seal lips, waft like fog between the staccato carved into the architecture of the scripted. Silence as the craft of slicing sound into distinction - for our minds to memorise the pace of its rhythm rather than the trembling in our bodies. Folding the unsaid until it fits between the lines of our fingerprints, neatly arranged by the ink of evidence left behind. Pressed against surfaces, guilty.

When I sit in those rooms then, silence is woven into the fabrics of our No. Yet parted so that it frames the windows of our Yes like curtains - to be closed when it’s dark enough, when behind can be seen, or once we have forgotten how to keep them apart. There’s no way to tell silence from clamour when we numb all sounds, including the ones we were yet to feel.

At times I talk of silence within - and with you, I wonder about the longing for a silent retreat. And then we move in stillness. Place lines on a paper to craft letters where voice becomes visible and we look for truth on a line placed upon.