Ants that hover under carpets pt 1: https://medium.com/@avantika.mishra/let-there-not-be-silence-5d5c4d44c196
“It’s okay, we don’t have to find out if he’s lonely” is not a very clever last sentence before walking away. Especially not to a banal reply I gave to your joke about lighters being lonely. But I could tell it made you sad to think that if it could, it would be sad, lost in a pocket.
I almost mocked you, and said that it would make me cry to think about that. But you’re not worried about the games of conversation. You’re thinking about the lighter already.
And I wonder what you’d have said if i told you“ lighters can’t be sad. All the burden of that feeling lies with us, and morphing it with human emotions to imagine a little bit of sadness in its life will not make anything lighter. A lighter definitely couldn’t. ”
But you walked out the main gate and I thought it made for a nice memory to remember of a stranger. But last week I saw you again. It’s a small city to escape from. You have a guitar that’s breaking from the edges, but you’re curling your toes to the rising silence in the room as the crowd flows towards you. As if gliding down a wave coming home to the shore, bringing a boat stranded for months at sea.
You’re singing about your “inability to use words to describe the sound of wind when it moves through a lonely tree on a highway, when a rushing car passes by.”
It’s a lot of things to visualize at once but your eye balls are moving rapidly through your closed eyes like maybe if you come to complete honest terms with your inability to use words to describe the sound of wind, the universe might listen and drop a hint.
It made me laugh to think of this and you caught me off guard at the bar later and told me that I seemed distracted. And I was. Listening and thinking how can you be so lost in the aching of not being able to sing about the sound of wind, how could you escape the weariness of life and not worry about real things like love, or loneliness. It made me feel like everything I sing about is in vain. As if this life we live is just to live, and not to write about. As if real life was waiting under the shade of a lonely tree, on a highway..
I couldn’t have told you that. So I told you I was distracted by an ant under the carpet- just the first imagined lie that came to my mind. If you didn’t look so satisfied with my answer, I would have immediately followed this by telling you that I was joking, and that I was trying to imagine what that wind on the lonely tree looks like. Another lie, but a better one.
But you did. You were so convinced that I was honest to you, that you were smiling.
So we never had the chance to stand in this corner of the bar anymore, where through a conversation, and a few more drinks, we could have finally reached to the truth and I could have told you that I feel like a lonely tree on a highway that you sing about, and that it says nothing about me because maybe everyone felt like a lonely tree on a highway in that room at that moment.
I had to tell you this because it’s become so easy to live with thoughts. For as long as I remember, I can’t tell people I meet what they make me feel. And over the years it has made me feel like a faceless doll sitting in a museum.
It’s like being an empty cup drowning inside a bucket full of silence. More and more silence makes way to climb inside the hollowness and before you can tell, the cup has drowned because of excess weight that it does not know how to carry while staying afloat..Or the Archimedes principle. It’s the same thing.
But the bottom line is that if you let it, silence will pervade everything.
It will eat through the corners of everything you want to say and you’ll only be left with tattered pieces.. like a dying book after a termite infestation. Good for nothing but to throw.
You have left.
The cup has started Archimede-ing.
Maybe that’s why we have to tell these stories fast, and not wait for the right time. Tell them even if they’re bad, or even if they make people cry.
