I am tonight nostalgic for a lake I rarely visited, have revised an exposition I wrote on silence a year ago.

1: On the deceptiveness of it. All the ostensibly ill-timed stretches of silence that I had indulged in were really full of words, words pushing against the dry backs of my closed teeth. I’d let those words surface sometimes as sudden, inexplicable smiles, and then I’d revel in the glorious solitude of it, in this the ability to be entirely self-contained in spaces packed with other people and their overflowing selves.

2: And on the necessity of silence; the alternative was words. And I love words, which is why I chose silence. I wanted to avoid the effluvia that comes with other people’s skin-crawlingly familiar floods of consciousness.
And, alternatively, I didn’t want to know the people, to know the I who wants to talk about she said he said they did what they did they. I wanted words laced with silences. Because I do believe, really believe, that people are capable of poetry, but it seemed like everyone was determined to be as tired and as old as possible – no, not old: to be staid and middle-aged, which isn’t an age.
So I decided to be old and quietly outrageous with my carefully delineated, intimate silences.

3: And the insidiousness of it. After a length of living inside your words and within your own silences to the exclusion of most others, the silence starts to seep out behind your lips and consume your words. So that even speaking becomes a chore, becomes a seeking out of foreign, strangely-shaped letters to compile into meaningful sounds.
And worse and worst, when you are incapable even of manufacturing those necessary, self-denying smiles.

4: And the sanity of it. I knew enough then to be silent in the presence of beauty: I knew that nothing was enough. So it seemed to follow, for me, then, that to find beauty I had also to be silent.
I knew that this was a leap in a logic and I knew that this sort grasping for misplaced common sense was a very specific sort of mistake that I was making, but I chose my fallacies with little thought and much determination.

This was my sense of disquiet: a searching out of a silence that I could live with, safely.