I will one day, when nostalgic for a lake I rarely visited, write an exposition on silence.

1: On the falseness of it. All these public ill-timed stretches of silence that I have been indulging in of late were really full of words. I could feel them just behind my lips. They’d surface in the form of sudden inexplicable smiles, and I revelled in the aloneness of it, the ability to be entirely self-contained in a public place.

2: And on the necessity of silence, because the alternative is words. And I love words, which is why I am silent. A flooding of words must necessarily include effluvia, just like any other flood. And who wants, really, to talk about she said he said they did what they did they. I want words laced with silences. Because I do believe, really believe, that people are capable of poetry, but it seems like everyone is determined to be as tired and old as possible. No, not old. To be middle-aged, which is not an age, but a way of thinking.
No, I will be old and anti-social in my lovely velvety silences.

3: And the insidiousness of it. After a while of living in your words and your own silences to the exclusion of most others, the silence starts to seep out behind your lips and consume your words. So that even speaking becomes a chore, becomes a seeking out of foreign, strangely-shaped letters to compile into meaningful sounds.
And worse and worst, when you are incapable even of manufacturing those necessary, public smiles.

4: And the sanity of it. We know enough to be silent in the presence of beauty: this is common, even polite, knowledge. So it must follow that to find beauty you must be silent. (This is a leap in a logic and I know it has a name, but I choose my fallacies.)

This is my disquietude: searching out a silence that I can live with, safely.