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1---
2title: What we are made of
3genre: prose
4
5id: what-we-are-made-of
6toc: "What we are made of"
7
8project:
9 title: Autocento of the breakfast table
10 class: autocento
11...
12
13There is a cave just outside of Flagstaff made from ancient lava flows.
14We went inside it to where the darkness was a presence, it walked with us like a Christ, our footsteps fell dead on its walls.
15We learned what space felt like, and drowning, and being crushed, and going blind and deaf.
16We made up words to push the feeling away, to goad it like mockingbirds fighting hawks.
17We called it creepy to its face.
18It stared back dispassionate.
19
20In a bathroom I know there is a low thrumming that comes from the air ducts in the ceiling.
21It comforts me in the same way the smell of toilet-water calms my stomach, it is a sound so close to quiet, so close to the porcelain whiteness of the toilet, it pushes all other noise away.
22It is deafening quiet in its most real form, its most realizable form.
23
24The eggs on the floor, broken.
25Not the eggs in their journey to the floor or from the farm or from the hen on the farm, in the cage, glowing under fluorescent lights, its neighbors pressed to its body, rotten-smelling, grotesque.
26Not the fateful meeting with the floor.
27Not the long wait in darkness for the fluorescent dawn, cacophonous with pain and smell.
28None of this: the sunlight on the kitchen tile, the refrigerator softly humming, the eggs on the floor.
29The yolks glistening.
30
31I compose with music best.
32Under its meaninglessness [I am able to hear the silence][], a different meaninglessness, a somehow-deeper meaninglessness, the inverse of repeating a word until it is only sound.
33I can hear the taboo, the never-spoken, unacknowledged.
34I write to drown its sound, with the scratching of my pen.
35
36Silence lies underneath us all in the same way \
37the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large \
38(though this is an urban legend, apparently) \
39
40I threw a party in my dream and went to the bathroom, down a long dark hallway.
41I began to leave and noticed the bathtub full of stuffed animals in a heap.
42I examined them each in turn: an elephant, a tiger, each backgrounded by white tile.
43A warthog sat at the top of the heap.
44It caught my eye, I stared, it slowly winked, sneering.
45I reached out my finger and poked it, like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
46It responded in kind, chuckling.
47I woke with a start, terrified.
48It had made no sound.
49
50There are at least two kinds of silence, in the same way that there are at least two kinds of sadness.
51There is the silence of after, the staring, open-mouthed silence, the what-do-we-do-now silence.
52There is the silence of before, the still before rainfall, the just-woken-up.
53
54There is, now I'm thinking about it, the silence of between:
55the waiting room after the heart attack,
56after the phone call,
57after the hurried drive,
58the fast walking down hospital hallways,
59the finding the room,
60my family,
61their faces the silence of after,
62the TV quietly playing _Maurie_,
63the silence underneath that; the waiting room _before_ the doctor comes in,
64tells us what happened,
65the chances,
66before my parents drive down,
67their three long hours in the car,
68before we become the Hospital People for five days,
69camped-out,
70loud,
71cackling,
72crying,
73doing crosswords,
74watching her die.
75
76The silence of wondering whether we could've known each other better.
77
78The silence of the long trip we prefer to believe she's gone on, which is really the silence of her absence.
79
80The eggs on the floor, broken.
81
82In other dreams, all I've watched all of my family dying.
83My father I remember best: he was on the wicker rocking chair on the porch, staring at the back yard, the evergreen trees in a magic triangle, their branches intertwined.
84We were all on the porch, and I heard like a far-away bell the moment of his death.
85I woke up crying, my throat closed with grief.
86
87Leaving after the goodbye at the hotel, [realizing I won't be home][] until Christmas, that I'm on my own long trip, someone on the radio station I'm listening to in the car screws up transferring tapes, broadcasts dead air.
88The silence yawns like a chasm, lasting for years.
89[The wind picks me up and carries me away][], I see everything from a great height, I see the future.
90I'm waiting.
91
92[I am able to hear the silence]: music-433.html
93[realizing I won't be home]: lappel-du-vide.html
94[The wind picks me up and carries me away]: riptide_memory.html