Silence drives me crazy. It allows me to think, to worry, to wish I had done this instead of that. Some enjoy silence, they revel in it. It allows them to think, to wonder about the future and ponder the mysteries of life. It allows them to expand and grow. There are a lot of people who enjoy silence, although not all of them have the luxury of experiencing it in their day-to-day routine. Some of these people live in large cities and towns and they dream of getting away from their mundane jobs and the constant noise that comes with living in a densely populated area. There are people like me, who despise silence. I don’t mean the kind of silence that you get when your brother-in-law tells an inappropriate joke at the annual family barbecue, I mean the kind of silence that is ever-present. This kind of silence occurs in places that are totally uninhabited by man or are almost so. These places, where the silence is so loud that it drowns out every other sound, are often sought out by silence-enthusiasts. Suburban housewives who stand at their kitchen windows watching the small children play in the street and the older children leaving for school, fantasising about how wonderful it would be to live in the countryside; all that open space would make a wonderful playground and to be so far away from the evils of the city… Policemen so sick of the crime and injustice they witness everyday, yearning for a place where even vandalism is scarcely heard of. The washed-up forty-something entertainer, tired of the media analysing his every movement in efforts to dissect his entire life just to sell a magazine. These people dream of the countryside and the escape it entails. They dream of the silence and being able to hear their own thoughts again. Not me. I dream of cities that never sleep and standing on the roofs of high-rise apartment buildings, watching ant cities hustle and bustle beneath me. I dream of airports and souvenirs and that feeling of going somewhere. I dream of parties and lazy days, getting made up and spending all day in my pyjamas. I dream of internships and part-time jobs, meeting new people and making new friends. I dream of music, gigs, musicians, being covered in other people’s sweat every Saturday night. I dream of finding myself in what others call noise, in the constant movement of the city. At least, that is what I used to dream of.
Silence is what’s making me insane. Every minute I spend in its grasp I lose a piece of myself. There are often moments when I forget who I am. There are often days when I consider slipping beneath my warm bathwater and never resurfacing - days when I consider wandering away into the woods only to be found years later, decomposed beyond recognition. This silence is killing me. I do not enjoy my own company. I do not enjoy knowing that if I walked seven miles I would still find myself alone. I do not enjoy silence. I’m not a noisy person. I don’t go out of my way to make noise. Instead, I sit and absorb sounds. I listen to other people talk, I listen to myself talk from time to time, I listen to music, I listen to the sound that an underground train makes when it’s pulling up to the platform, I listen to rain hitting the windowpane, I listen to angry winds ripping through the trees. I listen. Where I am, in this silence, there is nothing to listen to. At night I stare at the sky and I listen. I listen with all I’ve got, I often listen so hard that my hands begin to shake, my eyes being to water and my head starts to pound like the devil’s locked up inside and he wants to get out. This silence is numbing me. To a person who enjoys the constant noise and presence of millions of other people, this kind of silence is torture. It brings with it a kind of loneliness, a loneliness that settles in your bones and once it does it won’t ever let you go. This loneliness is cured in large cities, the kind that never sleeps. You lay awake at night and listen to your heartbeat; it’s comforting to know that there are millions of other hearts out there, beating too. The lights remind you of all the other people. The lights from bedroom windows, offices, bridges, cars, fireworks, clock towers, airplanes, parties, festivals… The sky reminds you too. You look up at the moon, you may not be able to see all the stars for the smog, but the moon… you know there’s a hundred other people looking up at it too.
