A Study in Silence

I turned off the AC and all the lights. Then I turned off my fan and unplugged my surge protector. After a while of sitting, I got up and unplugged my roommate’s refrigerator. With the refrigerator went the last stronghold of noise in the room, and a heavy calm fell on my surroundings.  

The first thought that ran through my head when I sat down in my silent room was, “even Dr. Legg has Pandora playing in his office.”

            My second thought was, “It’s going to get hot in here with the AC off.”

            My third thought was even simpler: “I’m hungry.”

            Thus my hour of silence began with a slide down Maslow’s hierarchy. It was an auspicious start. 

            Like a good little student, I immediately started to panic. 

            I have a history of intrusive thoughts that render my mind dangerous when left to its own devices. Over the years I’ve learned coping mechanisms that keep my head from turning on me, and one of those mechanisms is never leaving myself without an occupation. Noise is a good way to keep my mind occupied. So as the silence settled heavily in my room, it also settled heavily on me and my thoughts. 

            So naturally, my next thought was, “this was a bad idea.”

            And the thought that came after that was, “If Dr. Legg knew what it was like to be inside my head, he would have never assigned this.”

            And then I followed it up with, “No one knows what it’s like to be inside your head. It’s your head. Now shut up—you’re thinking too loudly.”

            I calmed my breathing because that was too loud, and I sat in total, heavy, silence. After a while, I started writing.

            Right away I ran into a problem. My pen made a scratching noise as it crossed the paper. I got up and switched it out for the single smoothest-writing pen I own—a shiny Cross that was a gift from a friend. There was still noise, but it was much quieter. That would be the best I could manage. I wrote slowly and listened to the smooth glide of the ink ball on the paper’s surface, feeling the vibrations from the friction travel through my hand. The room started to heat up, and all the smells you try to keep out of a dorm room began to leak from the pores in the paint.

            I thought to myself, “Why couldn’t I do this outside, in nature?”

            Then I thought to myself, “Because it’s a million degrees outside and you’re a city boy. You don’t like nature.”

            I kept writing and breathing until the hour was up. I had eight minutes until dinner, and I was going to make some noise. The first to go back on was the AC. Then came my roommate’s refrigerator and my fan. I left the lights off because it was still close enough to the raging brightness of summer for the room to be well-lit on its own. I was going to put music on, but I was suddenly struck by how loud all those items were when running all at once. The AC was a God-given right, and the refrigerator wasn’t mine. They had to keep running.

            But my fan was extra, and I turned it off. It made the room just a little bit quieter. 

            “I can handle a little quiet,” I thought.

This post was part of my final portfolio for a creative nonfiction course I took in college.