Darkness Stirs
Somewhere in the back of your mind is the endless welling of silence, spilling over like a stream of icy dark water, flowing through your life just below the surface. You've forgotten where it began. All you know is that you can't stand the quiet, that it figures in all your nightmares, that deathly quiet.
...like the silence that fell over the room, when they'd told you that Daddy was gone, he wasn't coming back. You were four or six or eight, and you felt like crying, for no good reason because you could hardly remember Daddy by then, but you knew you weren't supposed to cry, and it passed.
...like the silence in the house when your mother was mad at you again, because your mother is a lady, that's what Uncle Nick says, and ladies don't yell, they just give you that tight-lipped look and don't say anything. For days. You learned bad words in school, and you used them the next time she walked past you, and you kept it up till she slapped your face. It was victory, you thought, but she still wouldn't say anything.
...like the silence on the other end of the line, after you told Gail where you were going, and for how long, but not why, because you knew she knew. "Say something, honey," and the emptiness went on, and finally you realized that she'd hung up on you.
...like the silence that closed in on you during those winter nights in Virginia, silence without mercy, without any relief but the wind rushing past the windows, till you'd have sold your soul for a nearby highway, till finally you went a little crazy...
Your floors are wood and tile-- perilously smooth in sock feet, as more than one date has informed you-- your CD collection has a corner to itself, and no, you don't mind the neighbors, of course not, as long as you don't have to hear every sordid detail through the wall. This is the way you like it.
It's nothing so dramatic as a phobia. It's just that the silence is always there, at your back, under your feet like a subterranean lake, deep and dark and cold and treacherous.
And you don't like to think about it too hard.