The Great Silence
I stood in the red and blue colored cafeteria with hints of tan from the tables, filled with students, classmates, and friends. Sound and chatter surrounded me. A conversation comparing a recent test grade and subsequent GPA to the right of me, a heated argument between two friends to my left – about a party the girl with the brunette hair was invited to and went without informing her clear social counterpart. Standing in line to get my daily snack, it seemed that every way I turned, conversation was maliciously driven or surface level. The volume continued to increase, interrupting any peace I once had within my own thoughts. Louder and louder the independent conversations mushed together, turning to pure screams, anarchy, and chaos.
Closing my eyes and searching my mind for a second of solace or serenity, I approached the front of the line. I selected my typical pretzels, giving the cashier $3.00 even and speed walking out of the cafeteria. Walking down the hallway, the screams dulled, becoming a booming background noise. I walked through the empty hall aligning my step patterns with the noise, trying to ration a rhythm to the madness – right, left, right, left, rig- the hallway suddenly went silent. I peeked through the windowed panels to see what was happening in the once chaotic cafeteria. Expecting to see an authority figure at-the-ready to reprimand the room for “ditching” early or making a mess of the boys bathrooms, I instead saw a once colorful room turned gray – the blues and reds from the walls and the various shades of the rainbow leaving their owners. Every ounce of color levitated, forming a vibrant cloud at the ceiling of the room, leaving everything else black and white. Everyone stared as the colors were sucked by some mysterious gravitational pull, drifting farther and farther away.
The cloud entered the low hung ceiling and escaped outside where it combined with the floating colors from all other rooms in the building, multiplying in size by the second. Soon enough, there would be a vibrant cloud hanging over Earth in space, a culmination of all the colors from all over the world. The cloud was sure to not completely disappear but be always visible from a telescope, a mere sliver of hope that the vibrancy would return at once.
The room was cold and colorless. With any attempt to speak, simply no sound would come out. Students looked blankly at one another in black and white, unsure of what to do next. Schools were promptly dismissed and adults returned from work, all retired to their homes. Uncertainty filled the air. “How long would we be without words?” wondered the masses. Confusion quickly turned to anger as the makeshift methods of communication began to fail their employers. Excessive pointing and signing would never amount to quick verbal expression. Families and friends became infuriated with one another.
My family had departed early that morning for our daily schedules in a fight. A fight started during dinner the night before. My mother had interrupted my sister, Sienna, amidst her narrating a story about her chaotic walk with our two dogs. “A squirrel ran across the road and Bear became free from his leash, running to chase the pesky animal behind the neighbor’s house into their backyard. I ran off to catch him with Roxy still attached to her leash in my right han-” “How could you let him go?” My mother interrupted in the animated way she typically does. “-d. Because of the squirrel. I had no control over the situation. If you would permit me to finish, I would tell you what happened next and how I got him back”. And it escalated greatly from there. Snide comments over dinner turned to screaming shortly after. We all tired to bed ready for the break of a new day.
My mother and sister returned home ready to make amends, however speechless is what they found themselves. They tried to write on a single piece of paper, communicating back and forth through short written sentences. It started with “are you ready to talk about last night?” in black pen ink and ended with my sister’s door slammed shut.
New communication tactics became tedious and more confusing for not just the inhabitants of my home, but for homes everywhere. Silence crept into every corner, influencing isolation everywhere. Homes that used to be vibrant, filled with life and love, now desolate. Dinner tables that used to be filled with favorite, ethnic foods were now empty, family members making trips to the kitchen only when absolutely necessary and taking their food immediately back to the dark cave called a bedroom.
Inside, isolated. After all there was no point to going outside, the grass was no longer green, the sky no longer blue. Butterflies that once swarmed the spring scapes with their beautifully colored wings now were nothing more than another pesky insect. Fresh air was extinct to the common person. Instead time was spent in captivity, sleeping through the days and nights.
Although most bedrooms included a tightly shut or locked door, there was one thing a metal handle failed to keep up. I had read about it in the blogs that were still active amidst a hiatus from digital communication: the mysterious items that appeared in the bedrooms of their inhabitants. One middle-aged woman, Kelly, wrote how she noticed a guitar appearing in the back right corner of her bedroom and changed locations on a daily basis. Kelly wrote that it was almost like it was trying to talk to her because it wasn’t until she paid it attention and placed her fingers on the nodes that it stopped relocating. Kelly didn’t know what to do with the instrument, afterall the last time she had touched a guitar was at six years old when her father forced her into lessons (they didn’t last very long). Jack, about twelve years of age, wrote how a mysterious blow drying hair tool appeared on his bookshelf one day, moving to his bedside table overnight. He was confused, prior to the great silence he was an all-star athlete who played three sports, occupying fall, winter, and spring seasons.
I thought this occurrence was peculiar until I saw signs of it in my household. I noticed a pair of fluorescent white ice skates miraculously appeared in the back of my sister’s closet one day, moving to her floor the next. She had recently taken time out of her busy weekends to go to free skates, attempting to master complex turns and jumps on the ice. For me it was brand new boxes of graphite shading pencils that stacked themselves on my busy desk. After four days and four new locations, I finally picked up the box and opened it, tracing my fingers across the sharp, pre-sharpened points.
I took one out and started to draw. There was no direction that guided my drawing, just various lines, shapes, and shading. As I progressed stroke by stroke, pencil lines took shape as two friends surrounded by lively nature: laying in the luscious grass, admiring the clear sky, and watching the butterflies flutter with full wings. I lost track of time adding intricate details on every corner of the once sheet of white paper. By the time I made my last stroke and shade, I stepped back, wiping my graphite coated hand on a clean tissue from the box on my desk. It was strange; the drawing content was beautiful, illustrating an interaction that would take place in a pre-silent world but was deficient in color, resembling that of the current, reigning, silent world. It was ironic. Irony in such high capacity that I laughed to myself, the first bit of happiness I enjoyed since prior to the cafeteria. I laughed. And to my surprise, it wasn’t a silent smile but an actual sound escaped from my lungs. Real, live sound. Astonished, I looked around only to notice that there was a special delivery coming my way, directly towards my window with the sky as its mailer. A stream of color magically danced through the gray sky and through molding of my window. It seeped back into the rug, returning it to its original shade of blush pink that dates back to my ten year old room “renovation” in attempts to have a more “big girl room”. The green Aloe succulent was reborn, now a dusty green to fill its sharp prickly leaves. The lamp by my bedside table flickered, slowly returning to its yellow fluorescent hue. Oh how I missed the light!
I sprinted through the tightly closed door of my sister’s room, assuming that the same revelation had occurred for her. I burst into her room only to find a black and white room, the skates in the corner untouched, and her voice as non existent as ever. My excitement quickly turned into her confusion when I was exclaiming “MY VOICE IT CAME BACK!! ALL THE COLOR IS RESTORED!!” but she failed to hear anything I was saying. I scribbled down on the nearest piece of paper I could find “get your skates, we’re going to the rink”.
It was clear that the rink had been out of operation since the silence ensued, yet we snuck through the backdoor to find that rink two was as chilled as ever amidst the warm spring air outside. She laced up her skates, still confused as to why I pulled her out of her dark cave with such insistence and energy. Taking her first steps onto the ice, she wobbled, carefully regaining her balance from the rink’s thick side walls. Starting to glide, the mental rust that coated her skills wore off, freeing her legs to spin and eventually leap across the ice. As her skate imprints began to cover the ice – which appeared to be almost freshly laid by the zamboni which in reality had been 3 weeks since the machine took its last trip – my eyes widened once again. The magical gust of color entered through the domed ceiling of the rink, restoring the bleachers to their bright red shade. The lines for the hockey players took their stagnant appearance: red, blue, and yellow. She gasped as she watched life resume around her and for the first time in weeks, actual sound came out. She turned to me in disbelief, having our first sister conversation in what seemed like forever.
Pulling into the driveway, I sprinted up to my room to my computer as my sister embarked on the long awaited, apologetic conversation with our mother. I turned my viewer status on the online blogs to an official blogger. I wrote about the phenomenon that happened to Sienna and I, transparent in my confusion for the rationale behind it. I hit “send” and browsed through the recent activity on the page. One man, Peter, recorded from Pittsburgh, PA, how he started seeing various play props – those of which belonged to his favorite play, The Importance of Being Earnest – appear around his studio apartment. He worked a job in accounting and was always aware of his admiration for plays, but had never been in one. He ignored the props and day in and day out, his world remained gray and his mouth speechless. I followed up with Kelly, who picked up the mysterious appearing guitar and has yet to put it down. She taught herself the finger positioning for the classics for beginner guitarists: Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl ”, King’s “Stand By Me ”, and U2’s “With Or Without You”. She found mid way through the second chorus of “Brown Eyed Girl” that if she struck the cords, the beautiful melody would sound and she could sing along with the lyrics. The color came back into her life promptly.
Soon everyone began to give into the mystery appearance of seemingly random items. And one by one the world returned bright with color and enriched with sound. Society resumed how it was but something was changed, more vivacious somehow. From play props to ice skates to beauty materials to pencils to guitars, the items varied yet one thing was constant, once it was picked up, passion flourished and the item never wanted to be put down again. Passion. It was the driving force behind all color and all communication in this world. Maybe Earth or some heavenly body above just needed to remind us of our purpose. Maybe we just needed a push to discover what authentic communication is. Maybe we just needed to find our unique methods of self expression before expressing ourselves. Maybe all we needed was silence.
