The Sound of Silence
There is a place I always come back to. It’s a place in between one stop and another, where no one does anything but traverse. There, people who do stop become invisible to those who continue to move. This fascinates me in a way I can’t articulate and I find myself stopping to witness the invisible. In the process, I, too, become unseen.
Tonight there is a child, kneeling on the ground in traditional supplication, as if in prayer. We all beg the universe, for understanding, for sight, for knowledge beyond the simplistic senses of our minds and bodies. This child, however, is begging the universe for what it is best at providing: sustenance.
Many mistakenly think the universe is endlessly cold and eternally dark. An infinite void without thought or care. This is because the universe has never answered their prayers for understanding, and they simply know no better. The universe is full of light and warmth and the universe is full of the places in between. We faithful, we who Converse, understand the places in between. And what I understand, even if no one else has quite grasped the knowledge, cannot remember when their minds become waking again, is what lies in the places in between. The silence in between sings to me in harmony with the universe, and the song it shows me is this.
A child in supplication and the endless souls passing him by, unable to see him. Unwilling to see him.
When I close my eyes, I can see nothing but him.
This is the message the universe wants me to know. Every night it is seared into the corners of my mind. I walk endless streets all across Sanctym Noctym and I witness the ones in the in between places that no one can see. I see the invisible child with his bare feet and torn clothes and the way his skin clings to the bones of his rib cage. I see him begging and I see him slowly becoming too weak to get up to beg anymore, wasting away into the echoing silence that fills my mind every night. I also see him healthy and well, happy and brilliant, older, caring for the children of others who, like him, could not care for themselves. Just as I am the only one who can see him now, I am the only one who can see what he could have been. Every night, every night, until all that is within my mind is the screaming inside the silence.
In the moment while he is still begging, I lose my patience with the people passing by. I call out to them, demand they take notice of the boy, demand that they hear the screaming in the silent spaces. But I am not moving, and they cannot see me. In frustration I reach out to grab them, roaring my discontent. Begging them to hear. Demanding they do. They brush my hands from their shoulders, shrugging off my grip as if it were a jacket at the end of a long day.
They do not glance down to the boy. Their eyes are looking up, blinded by the bright neon lights arching over them on the high walls of the streets, lights that promise to whisper to them the words of the silence that they cannot hear. But they are fools, and the light drowns out the darkness of the in between. Staring with endless desperation at bright colors, they have forgotten that the places in between lack the color, the light, the noise.
It is my duty to make them remember, to help them see and hear. Beyond my duty; my purpose. The very reason for my existence. The one they beg in silent supplication is me. I am the only one who can give them the understanding, the sight, the knowledge beyond what their minds can comprehend. I can hear the silence, deafeningly loud, all-consuming, and I know that there is comfort and care in its coldness. I just need the words to make them understand, a way to explain it that their minds can comprehend.
This is what I am; I am in between the places that are in between and the places that aren’t. I rest between the nowhere and the somewhere, the silence and the noise, the darkness which loves and the light which blinds.
And I have to make them see.
I have to make them understand.