Sound and Silence
These words floated back to me today on a wave of free association, apropos of nothing, and slapped me in the face with all of my own suffering.
Now being without you
Takes a lot of getting used to
Should learn to live with it
But I don't want to
Being without you
Is all a big mistake
Instead of getting easier
It's the hardest thing to take
-- Chicago, Hard Habit to Break
The rest of the song doesn't apply, but it doesn't have to.
I used to wish that I was a poet, but maybe I should've wanted to be a songwriter. They're the poets that are remembered the most and with surprising fidelity. Maybe the music makes all the difference. Other poets are just spinning words out into silence.
I think I stopped writing poetry because I found a well of silence in me that went deeper than my well of words. So deep, in fact, that I have learned to fear the bottom that I have no desire to find. I think it might have always been there, waiting behind those moments that went beyond my abilities to explain. I glimpsed its existence in a certain murderous pair of eyes, and in my father, and in my grandmother's prayers. I felt it behind swells of love and despair. The silence brushed me like a moth's wing when I lost my early faith and swarmed like angry bees with all of the questions that plagued me. I lived in it during the darkest times of my childhood and, not coincidentally, during the bleakest moments of the last year or so.
No words I ever conceived got near to the silence that dwells in our lives like the downturn of a heartbeat - a silhouette to the din of existence, thrown into relief only in those moments of intense darkness and light.
The silence filled my mind, drowning things I thought I knew and obscuring images I relied upon. It filled my mouth so that I couldn't speak or breathe, which for me are something of the same thing.
And this silence, like death, is something I have done my best to deal with. I have had breakfast with it in my house, alone in front of the computer. I have met it in my bed. It still feels like a mistake, the decline, the breakup, the U-Haul carrying away my boyfriend and my cats and half of my life. A horrible mistake that I don't know how to solve.
I have given all of the words I know how to give, and all of the suffering, all of the love, all of the blood through which I've tried to make amends. Maybe the next step involves embracing that silence.
Now being without you
Takes a lot of getting used to
Should learn to live with it
But I don't want to
Being without you
Is all a big mistake
Instead of getting easier
It's the hardest thing to take
-- Chicago, Hard Habit to Break
The rest of the song doesn't apply, but it doesn't have to.
I used to wish that I was a poet, but maybe I should've wanted to be a songwriter. They're the poets that are remembered the most and with surprising fidelity. Maybe the music makes all the difference. Other poets are just spinning words out into silence.
I think I stopped writing poetry because I found a well of silence in me that went deeper than my well of words. So deep, in fact, that I have learned to fear the bottom that I have no desire to find. I think it might have always been there, waiting behind those moments that went beyond my abilities to explain. I glimpsed its existence in a certain murderous pair of eyes, and in my father, and in my grandmother's prayers. I felt it behind swells of love and despair. The silence brushed me like a moth's wing when I lost my early faith and swarmed like angry bees with all of the questions that plagued me. I lived in it during the darkest times of my childhood and, not coincidentally, during the bleakest moments of the last year or so.
No words I ever conceived got near to the silence that dwells in our lives like the downturn of a heartbeat - a silhouette to the din of existence, thrown into relief only in those moments of intense darkness and light.
The silence filled my mind, drowning things I thought I knew and obscuring images I relied upon. It filled my mouth so that I couldn't speak or breathe, which for me are something of the same thing.
And this silence, like death, is something I have done my best to deal with. I have had breakfast with it in my house, alone in front of the computer. I have met it in my bed. It still feels like a mistake, the decline, the breakup, the U-Haul carrying away my boyfriend and my cats and half of my life. A horrible mistake that I don't know how to solve.
I have given all of the words I know how to give, and all of the suffering, all of the love, all of the blood through which I've tried to make amends. Maybe the next step involves embracing that silence.