Longing for Silence, Missing the Noise

Hello. Can you hear me?

I miss you.

I...

When everything feels overwhelming, the only person I turn to is myself. But this self is not part of some collective, primordial soup of human consciousness. It is just a singular I.

I am.

I cannot remember not being, thus I am.

Sometimes I wish I were an ant.

The silence is both drowning and soothing. Sometimes the little death that quiet spaces provide is exactly what we need.

Trapped in a circle of self-confusion and self-indulgence, you sometimes feel lonely, but not alone.

Imagine a club.

Imagine a nightclub with millions of people inside. Everyone is dancing and screaming. Loud music. Bright lights flickering in the dark. Alcohol. Noise. Smoke. The lingering, oppressive weight of human skin against your skin. The violent irregularity of blood flowing through your veins.

And the emptiness.

Imagine the emptiness after the club closes.

This is my head.

A party that never ends. It swirls and turns and violates every moment of silence whenever its attendants feel like it. There is noise. There is always noise. Music and sweat and people talking, talking, talking...

Shut up.

Please, shut up.

The noise begins the moment I open my eyes. Usually, it is a voice pointing out every single thing I do wrong. It intrudes violently—rude, sadistically obtrusive, destructive, familiar, raw.

The problem is that I do not hate the voice.

The voice is my voice.

I am AND the voice.

AND the voice is me.

Shut up.

Then a moment comes when you long for silence again and again and again and again, and suddenly it is quiet.

The voices subside.

The tranquility of a calm sea after a storm.

You know the water is still muddy beneath the surface. There are still weeds and algae drifting below. But the surface is calm.

So quiet.

So calm.

And so lonely.

Then you remember:

Take a note.

Take a note to talk.

Take a note to speak.

Take a note to at least, goddammit, whisper your silence.

Damn it.

Growing up, I realized that being lonely and being alone are not the same thing.

Sometimes solitude is a choice.

Sometimes it is not.

It has nothing to do with silence, and it does not have to be quiet.

When you spend so long longing for the noise inside to stop, the noise outside begins to disappear as well.

The thing about silence is that it asks nothing of you.

Silence simply is.

Sometimes the silence outside is deafening while the noise inside is abyssal.

Sometimes I wish they were reversed.

Sometimes I wish I were not a singular I.

I need to be alone, but I need not be alone as well.

Sometimes I want to politely ask the voice inside me to shut up and let someone else's voice take its place.

Not forever.

Just for a while.

I do not want to be alone.

I do not want to be a solid I.

I want to be a we.

It is not about emptiness.

I am full.

I am so full that I feel I might burst.

There is no coherence here.

I am vomiting words onto paper as they arrive. The noise spilling out.

Sometimes I wish I were part of a hive mind.

Maybe that is why I wish I were an ant.

A solitary creature longing for a colony.

I wish the solitary I could become you and we and they.

I wish I were a network.

I wish for a collective consciousness—for me to be part of it, and for it to be part of me.

There is so much noise that I long for silence.

There is so much silence that I miss the noise.

My knuckles have turned white.

I forgive myself.