For being silent, you are so noisy. You are louder than the radio in the kitchen, the basketball game playing in the next room, the dog barking after the rabbit in the backyard.
Two summers ago, we had a nest of baby bunnies in the backyard. The dog was pure instinct, bred and born to hunt very small animals, to follow them into holes, to shake them to death.
We found one. And then another. In the grass. They are the size of a dollar bill. Once you see it, lifeless, it seems there is nothing else in yard.
The silence as I pick it up rushes through me. It’s not still or quiet. It’s violent.
I have been silenced by my own anger at times. In those moments--when I was young, angry at my parents, when a boyfriend slept with another woman--it’s as if I have never spoken a word in my life, as if I don’t know my own name. And I need to call for help. I need a way out. No words form and I am crushed, not by the anger, but by the silence exploding again and again.
Eventually, it stops. I find myself in a dry creekbed, a path cracked and scarred. I have no map back and though I hear something--a soft tapping somewhere, my breath as I inhale, a voice in my head that says walk--the landscape is always unfamiliar. There’s no sun or shadows, no direction to turn to or away from.
Silence does what it is supposed to do. It’s why, even as an an atheist and to no particular god, I pray.
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