The Ultimate Gift

Behind the thick layers of paint I can see that there is in fact a wall behind everything. Looking down the lane way faces look at me through the paint, each one of them with pensive sadness and happiness and all the rest.

Perhaps melancholy is the best word. For the explosion of colour is not loud, perhaps I can hear rain drops falling off the tops of the buildings, trickling down through the alcoves of windows and sills and displaced bricks.

I feel as if I am in the wall, part of this melancholy silence, watching the strangers walk by me. I sit there for days, watching the strangers as they look at me and laugh and smile and look away.

Oh how they look away.

Perhaps I am asleep, perhaps this silence is a dream. Perhaps this silence is in fact noise, a deafening silence. Perhaps I am in a dark room screaming at the top of my lungs. I feel, as I am part of this wall of silence, that I am merely an observer, unable to affect or have an effect on those that I witness.

I feel as if I am being dragged back into the silence, into the blinding darkness.

Living through a lens, unable to affect. Witnessing destruction and sadism and brutality, yet I am silent.

My eyes bleed ice, they are frozen in awe of the spectre that occurs around me.

Perhaps there is pleasure to be had in the silence, perhaps silence could in fact be my remedy.

Perhaps, perhaps.

Perhaps noise is poisonous.

Maybe, just maybe in this silence… maybe there is focus.

Maybe my silence is not deafening, piercing or at all a burden. Maybe silence, maybe observation is gratifying. I am not like the others. I can understand, I can feel, I can empathise with them.

Maybe silence is the ultimate perfection. The ultimate observation.

I look over my shoulder into the abyss of silence, and realise that perhaps this is the ultimate gift.

Perhaps.