(dis)quiet

Once upon a time he started running out of things to say and his tongue would tap against the roof of his mouth as he tried to think of, well, anything in response to queries and asides and concern. For a while, his conversation was awash with extravagant plagiarisms culled from whatever he was currently reading at the time. Facts and trivia and theories and dogmas and headlines and on one disastrous date, an entire twitter feed he’d scrawled on his forearm. His therapist still charged him for the one hour a week he spent silent in her office, the one hour a week he spent staring out a cloudy window and peering at the windows of an adjoining building where he could imagine that the occasional person he saw peering back or smoking on a balcony or watching television or reaching for someone else’s hand– he could imagine that they, too, felt the compulsion of silence, only they had kept going into that silence and come out with a new language that shaped a new world. He could imagine as he hovered on this frantic edge between desire and uncertainty, wanting to express the feeling of having this gaping vacuum in the middle of his chest that ate and demanded and cried out for more. He once spent four days confined to his apartment trying to verbalize the moment  that exists when his world falls silent and the ticking of the clock becomes a thunder. The four days ended with stale cereal and a mangled pendulum.

His silences grew and

September 19, 2012 | Categories: art, books, Photography, Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: #art, #clock, #desire, #dogma, #facts, #headlines, #photography, #plagiarism, #silence, #smoking, #theories, #therapist, #therapy, #trivia, #twitter, #uncertainty, #writing | Leave a comment