Let’s play the Quiet Game, the teachers say.
Some people are always playing, and for some, it’s not a game at all.
There is a blank space in my silence. It is filled with nothingness, and no one, and it has the foul odor of negligence. It is the scent of a forgotten dish rag lingering in an empty room, and the mere echo of laughter in an empty schoolyard. I am an extrovert and my silence is just me, turned inside out. It is the scaly insides of my skin and the messy running of my guts, pouring over desperate fingers, melting into salty tears.
Not all quiets are so abandoned or disarranged.
There is a fairy tale in his silence, for instance. A tall castle sprouts from the middle, perched on a bean stalk, grown from a magical garden of rapunzel lettuce. There is a witch there, but every time the silence happens, she grows smaller– and her ownership of the land recedes. Better storyland creatures are taking over. The goblins are reading, the dwarves are whistling, and the thumb-sized faerie has moved in with the old lady in the shoe. He is an introvert and, in a silence, he can build an entire planet or trample an old city down.
Quiet is made of guts and glory, magic and madness– but the measurements of each ingredient are up to each of us.
My blend is made mostly from madness.
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I was working on posting less this year, but I don’t know if that’ll really work out. The scheduled silence of my blog over the last two days reminded me of how cranky the Quiet Game used to make me. I was speaking to Dave about it, and he had fond memories of that game.
Did you enjoy the Quiet Game? What is your silence made of?
