Silence

At times, life seems so much longer than I thought it would be.

Words, remembered and learnt, trip drunkenly through my mind, snippets of a life I once lived that no longer seems either plausible or possible, and certainly not true.

Sometimes you find yourself seeking the peace of silence before you remember that you haven't experienced it  (or been with the absence of noise) for such a long time that it feels like a glorious lie invented by another to trick you into the belief that it exists. An impossible notion concocted by charlatans and fools to strip you of what sanity you felt you had retained.

You long for the time when there was quiet, seemingly so long ago that it aches your brain to recall it.   When you had it, you longed for the noise, the clamour, to stop the deafening cacophony of hush invading your ears and picking out your fears strand by strand. The horror of what that soundlessness meant; what it signified, what you thought it said about you. What you though you heard it whisper as you attempted to doze, crowding in and consuming you. How it never comforted you and only scorned you.

Now is different. You long for those periods of restless quiet, but they will never be yours again, not truly. Then you think of those who live a commotionless life, who yearn for the opportunity to wish for what they have, despising the silence that envelops them daily.  You could swap, perhaps. Could you?