Speak to me

The world is too full of silence. Still and heavy, suffocating with every space between breaths. I fill it with music and dialogue. Mozart, Papa Roach, Panic! at the Disco, but the silence persists, ever present. My body spasms and shrieks in pain, joints popping, bones pushing through muscle hoping to distract me but it is only the ringing in my ears that provides slight relief.

So I speak.

I speak of my thoughts. I speak of my feelings. I speak of every little thing that fills my senses and state of mind no matter how obscene or crazy. I speak so quickly that the words flow together, free but jumbled, each word pushing to be the first one out of my mouth, in the proper order or not. I can't keep them all in, everyone in my direct vicinity should know what I have to say. The pause to catch my breath is short lived, nothing more than a gasp but even still it is too quiet. Even if for just a second.

The teachers say "Look at you. You speak like an adult."

"Good vocabulary. Keep it up." So I talk and I talk and fill notebooks with all of my thoughts. Stories, feelings, questions constantly spilling from my fingertips and tongue. The light of new friends, the dark of recent loss, and all the jumbles in between, coherent or not.

I wander the yard and speak to the flowers, the squirrels, the birds; listening to their responses, even nature isn't silent. The trees creak and sway and battle with the wind for the melody but it is the birds who take on that role with the squirrels and foxes for harmony. The deer too stare at me in silence but I know they have accepted the silence while it seems I cannot.

I listened and talked over and over until there was a height of the battle. I would try to speak and there would be no sound, nothing but a croak where my voice once sprang so proud. I wrote, I signed, I banged on tables just to fill the silence, to get attention. The silence was suffocating me all over again but still no one seemed to care. And as my voice fought to come back I spoke of aliens and ghosts, the unseen who were silenced and lived in the shadows of the ever talking trees. I screamed and talked of everything but what hurt me, I listened to the world around me trying to drown out the silence ever pressing in from around me. But it never stopped. On and on and on. And no one listened, no one heard me.

So I changed how I talked and I spoke of nothing that cared, became fluent in lying on the fly and pretending each criticism didn't cause further damage beyond repair. I made up a connection, a pattern, something focused on the benign and unforeseen to simply fill the silence and be deemed bright. "What a unique perspective."

"What an interesting thought."

"I've never heard anything like it." I finally found the people who were pleased by me. I talked and talked and found myself the answerer to every question posed in class. To answer every question posed to me and to pose an equal number back. My thoughts were important, my opinions valid, my voice a welcome noise in the silence. Until it was not.

"It's annoying."

"What are you talking about?"

"When will you learn to shut up?"

I spoke all my life to quiet the silence and the silence won.