Safety

  Safety isn’t always what you think it would be. I never liked it when someone walked me home from the train station at nights, I’d get surly and sulk all the way home. A constant distraction. They were distracting me from listening to the crisp night air.

   Walking alone I could hear the city humming behind me, as busy as a beehive, my breath, coming out in rugged  tufts  in the cold and unfolding in front of me - the endless expanse of silence, a sentient creature all by itself. I felt a part of it, a tiny part of the omnipresent, permeating, condensed silence, all too happy to be a part of such a precociously peaceful existence. When I am quiet enough, I begin to hear so many tiny voices about me: the strangely gentle whipping of my coattails about my feet, the jingling of my keychain, the merry crinkling of the snow… Silent sounds, so quiet that the distant trill of a melody takes center stage, filling and almost overwhelming my senses.

   When I accidentally pass another human, I hold my breath without meaning to. So long as they don’t hear me, we don’t share a common universe of sounds. So long as I’m quiet I’m nonexistent along with all the other tiny voices. Whether we hear it or not, everything around us is alive and sounding its own distinct call to everybody else.

   But when I walk by an inhabited building, it’s not quiet- it’s STILL. So many people all close their doors and windows, lower their voices and turn off the lights. They don’t want to be a part of the living silence, whether they hear it or not.

   I like to stand right in the middle of a square of houses and listen. You can even hear the sky whispering.