Catalogue of Silences

<p style=”clear: both”>Someone, somewhere, wrote that a silence was only meaningful if someone was expecting you to talk.

And I want to explode this because where does the meaning come from, the act, the not communicating, the expectation, its breaking, does it mean what I mean it to mean? Meaning-siginificance, meaning-intention?

So posit not just a silence, but a screen between us, I cannot see your face:
I don’t know if it’s mute pain or calculated, sitting back, in control silence. I imagine the one, and then the other, though I generally fail to imagine all of the in-between silences. I don’t know if you’re there, don’t know if you know I’m there. (so okay: we’re both silent. either one of us could break it. And then it becomes a different game, a who’s responsible, really game, a pride game, a blame game, a game I need to be too grown up to play now.)

For all I know you have your phone out, are fiddling with it, not even aware that it is now, officially, a silence. Waiting.

I catalogue the times I’ve fallen helplessly mute and all the forces that come up against speaking, the self-censorship, the run out of things to say because we’ve said them all, and said them all again, and don’t see the point of trying one more time. The lacuna, the silence as meaningful absence, pointing to another thing.

Your silence a window, and am I going to trample and tread to go up right against it and peer in? What will the neighbors think?

The varieties of silence, I mean, you have to include the warm silences, the so-connected we don’t have to make nervous talk and fill it in, knowing silences, eyes met, wicked grins.

There was the party where someone mentioned the five minute lull (elsewhere, I learn, seven-minutes or twenty, five minutes, being a computer memory rule — or well, there are lots of five minutes rules) and then the uncomfortable laughter as again and again through the evening simultaneous conversations would come to simultaneous dwindlings.

Or exhausted silences. A friend told me, about her autistic son, that what she needed him to understand was that to walk through a crowded room with his head down, not meeting eyes, not speaking was still to communicate something and I think that sometimes that is more than I can understand, after all.