Soundless Asylum
I awake to the same brown nebulous sky that is my ceiling every morning. Motionless swirls of cloudy, wood-stained galaxies lay in close proximity with each other, each blotchy star with their own nucleus possibly containing lifeforms in perfect harmony. The crisp sound of morning quiet greets me, but the serenity is short-lived with the faint sound of grinding gears. I am thankful for the wrong reasons that they are not as loud as they used to be.
Almost each morning I am rendered mute. My voice immobile and for that, becomes telling of where I am but not where I place myself in this world. Sadly, a lot of people would think otherwise on the latter, which frightens me all the more to speak — how we are reduced to caricatures of our former selves, disingenuous at times and speaking more as self-affirmation than reflection. I start to wonder if we’re only talking amongst ourselves, or if we’re even talking to anyone at all.
My mother comes into our room and raves about our people’s frivolous nature and in, turn, our ignorance as we are being exploited and robbed without seeming to mind, or worse, are happy to do so because we refuse to see it as such. One thing I don’t quite understand is I can’t find it in me to have anything to input, even when I agree with her. At times, it feels like she is talking at me and not to me. And despite our politics being in line most of the time, I can’t find it in myself to support her statements, let alone talk about the subject. My mind becomes a vacuum and all I’ve read and studied is consumed by that vacuum. Hence, for the most part, I reply with nothing but a distant stare as she lets loose that pent-up rage towards our failure of a government, and rightfully so.
What happens is that my introspective silence is often mistaken as indifference, and my aversion to engage is also inaction. Make no mistake. Indifference especially in today’s political climate and having been raised from a middle-class background is akin to being ignorant but worse. Because you are electing to be ignorant out of your own volition. But my silence in this household is not my submission to our country’s transgressions, but of something else entirely. Something abstract rooted from years of memory. The closest approximation towards it is fear, and such topics become associated to it like repressed trauma.
The apartment’s silence often rings with the wails of memory; of unresolved parental and sometimes even marital conflicts that remain frozen and suspended for now. My prayers primarily constitute of pleas that the most recent dispute be the last, but it would also be wishing for rain on a wasteland that has only experienced a lifetime of drought. I learned that the best I could be offered was quiet and the state of temporal indifference shrouding over our household.
Each memory of dispute is treated as an omen — its remembrance a premonition. It was something that could and had to be evaded with three knocks on the closest piece of wood immediately. How sad to cling to such superstition. Better safe than sorry, I say to myself. Expend all means to preserve the quiet even if all of that is ultimately futile.
What is speaking but communication, and what is communication but a vocal treatise for understanding. But I learned that here, resolution was far off, and the best I can ask for is an adjournment, which the quiet after the tremor grants me, and even then the silence hangs still, with the intensity of anticipating an aftershock.
In this home, speaking was only for reaffirmation of being on the same side. My language — the language of silence speaks for my immobility, there was nothing to add that wasn’t already said and even if there were, it was rendered treachery, and another intervening voice was nothing more but an addition to the violent fissures of restless sound.
My language is guarded; reserved with an impetus of keeping the self from ever becoming real, leaving only an apparition.
