Silence

NaNoWriMo daily prompt for October 19th was "silence"...

There are storm clouds gathering over the city.  No snow yet, it’s too early yet, but definitely thick ominous clouds.  Sweatshirts have emerged, hands shoved deep into pockets and backs hunched over from the weight of dread.  The streets are dry, which makes the cold and clouds feel even more powerful, as though rain would somehow sooth away the destructive force of the approaching winter.

The city hangs suspended in a web of silence, waiting.  Each breath drawn brings the ice into your lungs, the scrap of a razor down your throat, but it is better now than it will be later.  You can see it in the eyes of your neighbors as you pass them on the streets, the acknowledgement that it’s coming, it’s only a few more weeks away.  Suddenly men who walk with their shoulders straight and their heads proud are pausing at doors, worrying the arms of their jackets as they look apprehensively outside.  You can smell the fear on those who are older, as the sudden realization that winter is near and what once meant mere inconvenience can suddenly mean never seeing another spring.  No one knows what to say, what magic words once whispered by witch doctors can keep the cold at bay.

A few break the silence, chuckle merrily about the weather when they are delaying at the door.  These are the ones most frightened by the approach, seeking out the comfort and warmth of another’s reassurance.  They’re the ones who feel it in their bones already, in the ache of their joints and the pressure of the hat around their ears.  They are grasping for those magic words, seeking fruitlessly for someone to say “it’s only today, it’ll be warm tomorrow, winter will not come”.  But winter comes, it always does, and they know their helpless grasping is futile.

So silence prevails.  The city surrenders to sweatshirts, then sweaters, then coats, then boots, then gloves…each little defeat is a victory for the coming season.  We dawn our armor, reinforce our homes and try to fill our bodies with the warm of each other, but the cold prevails.  There’s nothing to be said.  Winter comes.

Noise

Prompt for today from NaNoWriMo is "noise"

There’s a noise in my head when she’s near.  It bounces around the confines of my skull, trapped between bone and soft flesh, turning my cerebral tissue into a trampoline as it ricochets from neuron to neuron.  It starts in the occipital lobe, that portion in the back of your head were all the visual information is processed, triggered by blue hair and gray glasses and ears ringed with piercings.  Then ping-ping-ping, off it goes, triggering memories of late night sex when it hits the hippocampus, the ring of heavy metal when the temporal lobes- the sound centers- are struck, the taste and smell of Thai chili as it travels.  A hyperactive two year old on amphetamines, the noise bounces off the confines of my head and I have to blink every time so it doesn’t come crashing through my eye sockets and out into the open.

Sometimes I don’t hear her, because of the noise.  We’ll be curled up in bed, legs entwined, my head on her chest and my eyes closed to keep in the noise.  She’ll be speaking about something, recounting a soccer game or explaining some type of computer system she designed at work, but the white noise buzzes in my ears and I lose track.  I try to focus, to draw the sound of her voice in past my ear drums so it can fill my skull instead, but then the pressure of so much noise begins to press on the gray matter and I have to pick one or the other.  It becomes so intense, listening to the noise and her voice and trying to figure out if I have a voice in all that.

But then, late at night, after our legs had unwrapped and rewrapped around each other a thousand different ways, there’s silence.  Silence in my head at least, as the pound of her heart echoes in my ears and the sound of her breathing fills my head.  The noise in my head goes silent, and finally it fills with her, just her, the sound of her presence not bouncing but rather gliding.  Her noise comes in waves, washing over my brain, and consuming more and more of the space.  It sinks into the crannies, the nooks and valleys and ridges, and creates a protective barrier against the white noise.

It’s then I settle back into sleep, protected and sheltered by her noise instead of the insidious noise of my own head.  It’s then, in the beating of her resting heart and the soft gasps of her dreaming state, that my head finally goes silent.  And then there is peace.

NaNoWriMo

I am participating this year.  My username there is yumesandman.  Hopefully it will go better than my dedication to this blog.

If anything though, it means you can expect at least a few more updates on here.

Eve.