Silence haunts me, but not always in a hollow way. Sometimes it is sweet, the soft touch of two people staring out at the stars together, and sometimes it is as bitter as winter's cold as you wake up, go to school, go to work, go home, and eat dinner all alone. Even in a crowd, when that ever audible buzz of conversation rings in your ear, you feel the silence. It is not just an absence of noise, it is something deeper.

Remembrance of Silent Beginnings

"I've always been a big fan of being on my own, of long silences broken only by the wind whipping through the open windows of my car on a long drive, or the crackle of leaves beneath my hiking boots.  Being alone always has had a way of captivating me, especially while in the woods.

If you stop for a moment, on the trail, with no one for company except the wise, tall trees that beckon your gaze towards their peaks, you can sometimes notice the silence.  When the calls of birds fade, the rustle of squirrels seize in the foliage, the silence is as sudden as the crack of a rifle.  It hits you with a force to stop your foot from coming to earth, from breaking the twig beneath it.

The silence is haunting, but why?  We are so accustomed to noise, to music, to animals, to other people, even to the wind rustling in the trees, that we have forgotten silence.  It's terrifying, it's all enveloping, it cannot be circumvented.  Even the sound of your own voice pales in comparison to the vastness of the void about you.

Last week I went for a walk on a nature conservancy.  I trudged through the few inches of snow with little more than a crunch.  It was cold that day, cold enough to keep all other creatures inside their homes, hunkered down, huddled together against the bite of the air.  Why did I brave the elements for a long walk into the patchwork of light that filtered through the sullen clouds and snow tipped trees?  Silence.  Solitude.

I'd been living alone, in a strange city, long enough to spend most of my days and nights alone, and to be comfortable with that.  I had thought about all of those days I had spent without uttering a sound, but even living alone, there is never silence.  The turning of the pages of a book, or the humming fan of my laptop, always catch the ear.  The silence that day in the forest, when my footsteps had ceased in the snow, was deafening.

I was truly alone, even the small herd of deer I had scared from their beds had left me.  Nothing made a noise, not even the frigid creaking of the tree trunks, complaining about the bitter air.  The silence sucker punched me, weighing down on my shoulders with the loneliness of it all.  It only wanted a friend, but a friend who could remain silent with it.  Noise made its silence seem all the more fathomless.

It reminded me of all that I had been through, all the tears and tribulations.  Made me question what being alone really was all about.  The lack of noise that had been going on for so long in my life was broken by this even greater silence.  It forced my eyes open in its icy talons, letting me look deeper into the mysteries of this loneliness, this silence.  This haunting stillness was by far the greater of the two types of loneliness.  Those hushed moments, living alone with nothing but the clack of fingers on a keyboard, or the scratching of a pen to paper, were just moments in time.  It let me see that all those solitary days have silence in them, but they are a temporary silence, one that waits patiently to be broken, to let light fill the hole where it had once been.

We all live our lives in this silence, waiting for the right moments that can break its hold upon us.  With a sharp pin, a bright laugh, a shared adventure, noise will flood back to you, and fill your life with what you had briefly set aside.  Weighing the silence in my hands I could see, that the silence of being alone wasn't a silence at all, but just a way to appreciate the little things that makes us live all over again."

A Haunting Silence of Three Parts

I wrote those words two years ago, six months after I had moved across the country to a desert wasteland, and then back to the northeast. My first winter in a new city was spent alone in a house, with just the howling wind as company. Just as in The Name of the Wind, it was the first silence of three parts.

The lack of movement in that house was hollow, and empty. Usually filled with the noise of the TV my grandmother always had on, or the laughter of family over for the holidays, it felt empty. Living there made me empty.

That first silence drove me inwards, testing the creative parts of me. I'd always been the type of create stories out of nothing. I had grown up playing in the woods alone most of the time, or with my brother or cousins. New worlds would open up before our eyes, and monsters would dart between the trees. Intricate storylines would play out over the years, following us wherever we went, adapting as we did.

I wrote my first novel in the fourth and fifth grade, and had finished two more before I had graduated from high school. I've kept up with my writing since then, but sometimes the silence takes a hold of you and stems the words flowing from your hand.

My first winter alone in Albany, I delved deep in me, writing whatever I could. I started getting more seriously into photography, and testing out how far my creativity could take me. 

The second silence was the one you feel when you stand in a crowd and just stop. Everyone moves around you, like water flowing around a boulder in an icy stream. There are people all around you, maybe even paying attention to you, but still nobody sees that you're there.

This second silence pushed me into the third, a silence of my very own.

It poured from me in waves, rolling from my skin like fog over the shoulder of a mountain. It was the ever-present silence of the stars in the sky, looking down on you in the dark. It was the burnished quiet of a man staring through a window as the world passed him by.

Those words swept me up in bitter winds, smoothing out the jagged edges of my dark moods and quiet actions. It was the silence of loneliness, of brief flashes of fire in the night, when small words lead you to brief adventures with strangers, of deeper shadows, of darkness and of doing things alone.

It was the silence that pushed me behind a camera lens to view the world in a different light.