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The silence was deafening and the darkness heavy and all encompassing. There was a flicker of light outside the window that seemed to be miles away, although when I crossed the room towards it, it seemed to get farther and farther away, wavering through the glass and retreating into the distance.
I was alone, with nothing but my thoughts as a companion. My thoughts and the silence, the two things that scared me more than anything in this world.
It was partially my own fault for working late, although how I could have foreseen the citywide power outage was not exactly at the forefront of my mind. I didn't have to be here, not for sixteen hours a day. But I needed to be, as strange as that sounded. It was easy here, although it should have been quite the opposite. The distractions here, pianos, music, students, the pile of glass shards that sat on a shelf, they were mine, all of them and they allowed me to lose myself in them.
It was very easy to put on a smile, all sunshine and lilies and light here, to hide behind what I did, be the person that everyone else needed me to be.
The memories filtered through my mind, projected on the back of my eyelids like the picture from an old projector; slightly grainy, sepia toned and maybe a little bit blurry in some places while others stood out in stark relief, all black and white and red.
It wasn't the memories that were getting to me, not even close. It was the silence. I wracked my brain, looked futilely around the office in the dark for something, anything to break that nothingness, to put an end to the quiet.
There was nothing. I sat on the floor in the corner of my office, feet tucked under me and just existed with my thoughts. And the silence.
For the first time in months I allowed myself to focus on the constant thoughts that had plagued me, that I had fought and pushed away as best as I could.
It was so very surreal, these moments. There was no order to the way they passed through my mind, rhyme and reason were non-existent. The nonlinear images that made up my life both crushed me and managed to build me up simultaneously. And I thought it would break me.
I wasn't alright, I wasn't even close to it, not in that moment.
Sitting in the dark, and silence, shivers running up and down my arms despite the lack of air condition and the temperatures that were, I had no doubt, still over one hundred outside the walls of my studio.
The silence wormed its way under my skin and into my veins, the last place I wanted it to be, not whispering the truth but screaming it into the nothingness, reverberating through my entire being.
I sat with it as best as I could, biting my tongue as the coppery taste of blood filled my mouth.
I was scared. Terrified of being buried alive by my fears, my memories… myself.
It was so simple to just push everything aside, to search for solace and avoid dealing with the images that haunted me. To pretend that things were okay. There wasn't anything else I could have done, not really.