its_quiet devalis It’s quiet here. I don’t like quiet, makes a place feel empty, even when you can feel the heat of bodies pressed close for support, the humanity filling the room, brimming, telling you the opposite. People should thrive and hum, just being alive. Quiet is unnatural. It scares me. Here, it’s like everyone has turned to ashes, not just the one who’s inside the pretty box. The first funeral I had been to was for a mother. Everything seemed to go in slow motion, the long Hebrew laments and the words from loved ones. I couldn’t quite understand in my head, but my heart was shrouded in black for her, for the girl-child. I couldn’t cry, even when she small, pale girl came to the podium dressed in her deepest sky blue and wrenched the large, bright words “My mother was very strong” from her soul of souls. Even when she stumbled off afterwards to go drown her sorrows in the salt water that refused to flow from me. I only attended two funerals after that, within a month of each other, the youngest member of my family followed by the oldest. The first had only been an infant. Everyone sang at the ceremony, loving and living in song, in sounds. All I could think was that I had never even imagined a casket so small. She was the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, just asleep in her pretty box of a manger. I had expected her to wake up crying because of the noise, the music, and the pounding rain on the rooftop. It always rains. Expected her to make noise in response, be alive. She didn’t, though, and I couldn’t mimic the skies… I knew where she was and that it would be okay, that it already was. They had my great grandfather stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey, thick. I wanted to laugh because it wasn’t real, but wished I was crying. Felt left out, like there must have been something wrong with me that I didn’t cry, hadn’t, couldn’t. I wanted him to wake up because of how loudly the pastor was preaching, wanted him to get up and shout, ask why they’d made him look so silly. To shout, to be alive. But it’s quiet here. It’s my friend’s father that is ashes and everyone sits like ashes themselves, as if they’ll blow away with the movement of their own breath. No one sings, no one speaks. I wonder what they’re thinking, if they’re remembering moments, pictures, laughs and cries… remember the noise he used to be. I wonder if maybe they’re no so much scared of the quiet as they are sad of it. And… what’s this? My rivers are flowing and my salt matches the water sliding down the windowpane. The heavens and I rain together and even the droplets that should pound upon the rooftops don’t dare impose upon the silence. 031203 ... thestoryteller . . . The sounds of quiet are like the leaves fallen from a tree. If you listen very closely you can hear them land gently among their brethren. . . . 031203 ... andrew It's quiet here There are no sounds except that of a far off bell Ringing, ringing tone after tone. nobody makes a noise not even the shuffling shoes of the pole-bearers make a noise yet the bell tolls, the bell tolls, but for whom no one knows 031205 ... somebody bc your never around, I can't believe what you just said on the phone tonight! how the fuck do you expect us NOT to be distent with one another when your never around!! hell-fuken-0 any one home in that head of yours their is no way in witch we can generate closeness (even just simulated closeness) if your never even around! no your to "bizzy" being with her that you have to SCHEDUAL ME IN!!! Did you fuckin SCHEDUAL that phone call to me?!?!cross it off your To Do List!?!?! 031206 what's it to you? who go blather from