A Song Of Silence

What does loneliness sound like? 
A scream that no one seems to hear. Gasps that don’t make it past the throat. Sentences written in invisible ink. The redacted words on a page.

It’s feeling unwanted, unnecessary, irrelevant even. Then you remember. You still exist. The print under the graffiti, the face under the veil, the writing on discarded applications. The breaths you leave behind in desolate corridors hang in there, unobliterated. Loneliness can sound an awful lot like peace then.

Who are you when the screams die down, when the words fade? Maybe we are all lonely.

I found my insides erupt in rapture, during conversations about maths, punctuated with memories of every mood. And through everything a steady beat, because what else is mathematics but the joy of patterns, the collective staccato of beating hearts? Rhythm reminds you of the notes you only pretend don’t exist but you hear them in your head anyway. Always.

Afterwards, I walked in silence by myself, briefly entering conversations of eyes and lips while crossing roads and running an errand. Still on beat. The shrill taps leading the unheard booms.

Later, I read a book sitting in a bookshop. Periodically I’d look up, watching other people like myself, readers moving through bookshelves, each in a dance of their own thought streams. These were the skipped beats, the pauses that make up melody as much as the notes. 
The romance of this, is what drives musicians and writers to wax eloquent. It is the null state of mathematics, the shunyata of meditation.

Loneliness is its own song, when you learn to hear it.

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I’m Ramya Pandyan (a.k.a. Ideasmith) and I’m on Twitter and Instagram.