Learning to Listen

Silence is definitely something that can be heard, and right now my silence is trying to tell me something, but it's been so long since I've used this language, forcing myself to vocalize at every turn, thinking it will help me overcome some mysterious social barrier between myself and the rest of the world. I want my ears to soak in the nothingness, relay its message directly to my brain so I don't have to worry about the meaning becoming lost in translation. No one else can interpret my silence, and that's the way it should be. These words are silent too and are meant to be. But again, my silence is not a void.
Alone in this room, far from lonely but not quite sedated and content, I let my books, my walls, the inaudible bass beat of my heart that conducts the rhythm like lightning through my hands, flood me. I'm drowning so comfortably, jubilantly suffocating on matters that matter, on anti-matter with more substance than all of this. My body is blending now, my lungs filling, outside becoming inside. I no longer need eyes.
Before we had music and language and cars and the streets they drive upon, we had silence, whose own musicality sufficed for generations as bearing meaning, as constituting the everyday everything of our predecessors. A great new medium emerged as the voice grew impatient, an adolescent breaking the rules and setting its own terms, feeling abandoned by his parents and rebelling as loudly and vehemently as possible. The silence submitted, realizing that each child must have his day, must pass through such a period, must become grown. But the silence still cried at the loss of his meaning to the human condition. Thrown into the nursing home and forgotten, this silence threatens senility, and who can blame it, when all the respect we pay is squeezed into Christmas cards?
So I'd like to volunteer. Silence, I'll spend time with you. You have so many stories, so much to share. You are my richest of elders, and I long to give back to you all that you have sacrificed in order that I may integrate into society. There is no substitute for what you have given me--the inaudible, intangible, only-intelligible-to-me voice of my being. I desire connection with you, and it is precisely because of this that I have come to understand your most treacherous sacrifice. So let's commiserate. We'll leave our verbiage at the door.