It’s quiet at first. A pure, clean silence. A beautiful silence, the silence of a gymnast in the air. Then the silence charges. It’s slowly filled with desire, with expectations. No words are forming yet. In the space between you, the air is out of the way. The gymnast is in the full mood. And you can just watch. And yet you still don’t look with your eyes. And the gymnast’s close to landing and the silence is shaking.


Somewhere you can hear a drum. It does not interrupt silence. The air between your eyes is waiting. There’s such a fragile second. You can feel when the classical dancer touches the ground beneath her. Comparisons don’t matter anymore. If one of the pairs of eyes doesn’t look at the other, then the sounds of bones breaking will strike the silence. Silence waits, air waits, dust threads clear the way between finger and string.


Now the silence vibrates. Your silence is its peace. You’re not looking at it yet. Silence has too little time to feel the vibration. Silence despises the necessity of words. They break silence. Silence is a cage with 47 unique birds. None of them makes a sound. Still, someone has to say something. Silence is afraid. It’s like not even one of the birds deserves to talk. I feel the vibrations of the drum in the cage’s brass. Birds need to speak; they can no longer be silenced. You let go of one. In its flight, the silence is rebelling. The last letters of “Hi, what are you doing?” don’t synchronise with the air in your lungs. The silence puts a stop to the word that feels like a small child into the sand. Silence is endless. Silence laughs. Silence is surprised.


Now they’re dancing. Many times it’s a run. Your silence is playing with their silence. You’re a kid again for a while. You’re only concerned with games. The kids are tired. Silence listens. For days the words don’t touch the silence. You sometimes hide the window through which you can see a glimpse of the room with everything you own in the world. Silence wants to come in. Silence is afraid. You open the door and watch it come in. It’s looking around. Silence wants to ask you not to ruin anything. Silence is worried you won’t like what you’ve gathered there. You’d like to explain to it that some things just came up. It starts touching objects, trying to move them. It manages to move them. Silence breathes hard. It sees your whole little room, small and fragile. It looks at you, tells you it likes to be here. You invite it to stay for a while. One day silence takes shape.


Silence is accurate. You can finally see it with your eyes. It’s getting accurate. Someone calls herself as your grandmother; she has brown hair, blue eyes, she sweats, she cries, she only knows how to make an omelette with olive-oil, and in the end, you’re thanked for all her peace. Her silence isn’t perfect. Her silence was scratching a little at the corners, but your silence was also scratched. Yet your silence is not disturbed by her silence. Her silence sticks to your silence. Start having the same scratches—your silence.


It’s been a while. Something is starting to take away your peace. Your silence blames her peace. Her silence condemns your silence. Your silence is disappointing. You don’t know what makes your peace run away from her peace. Your silence throws stones in her silence. For a second, her silence is destroyed—the sound of her destruction breaks you and your peace. It breaks your silence for two seconds. You tell her you don’t want to hurt her, but she already knows that. Your silence is concerned. It hides your silence from the sounds.


It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. Your silence protects her peace through absence. You see it less often. You think breaking the link will be better. You know nothing about her. In your room, the door remained open. She left a mess. You start tidying up. Maybe she’ll come back. Silence hurts. Silence hurts so much. You see her after a few weeks. She’s changed. You don’t know if there’s any peace. Thousands of birds want to fly out of the cage—every bird with a desire and a memory. You’re closing the cage. You kill the birds. She’s leaving. Your silence is decomposing. You’re trying to glue it back together. It’s the last sip of wine in the 14th glass that night. Silence howls. She’s screaming, and there’s no noise. There’s no noise yet. Silence lives only in memories. Your room still has traces of her peace. You clean them like dust. They disappear, making brief noises.


Silence is gone. Now it’s noise. Now it’s just noise. That’s how I loved it.