“Why are you so silent?”

You ask me why I am silent,

well, it's because I am worried about death.

Your death, my death, the end of it all.

I am silent because the tune

of that distant song

that's travelled through space till it's barely a hum,

is so vaguely familiar...

it forms a bubble in my chest.

It floats up bobbing in cheeky uncertainty.

I'll wait impatiently for that bubble to pop so that I can play that song and fill this space with it.

It won't be quite so silent then.

But it never has been all that silent.

Don't you feel that weight in the air?

Hear it's squeaky, shuffling struggle?

I've been trying to hide it from you

but surely you've clocked it by now.

It's burdened with all the worries

that couldn't fit in my head.

Worries about me, worries about you and worries about how this will all end.

How the summer will begin

and stretch on endlessly

till it won't anymore

and I'll pine for it in the winter.

(I apologise for the pun)

I'm sorry I'm so silent.

I have just too much to say

and I'm scared it will come out, all at once

in a disturbing, guttural groan.

I have too many questions,

that I'm scared

you'll have to turn the world over stone by stone

to answer them.

And I have too many gaps in my knowledge of myself

and they translate into awkward pauses

that take up more energy than I can spare.

But mostly I am silent

because it often says more, more eloquently than I ever can.

The visceral, incommunicable, intuitive truth

that lives in every one of us

and can be heard humming

when the world isn't too loud.

It's saying I'm going to die, you're going to die and it's all going to end

so, why not sit silently till tomorrow again?