The Sound of Silence

I looked at the house, sitting there lonely and silent.  I remembered the time when warm, inviting light shone from the windows, and friendly chatter drifted out from the sheltered cove and across the lonely sea.  But that was years ago now.  Now, the house was rickety, battered relentlessly by wind and water.  I began to carefully climb down the cliff side, my hands and feet slipping perfectly into holds worn into the rock face by generations of use.  I approached the house, the blue sky playing peek-a-boo through the grey clouds reflecting my bittersweet mood.  As I climbed the stone steps, I remembered being told that there was a time when they were rough-hewn, and actually stair shaped.  They had been battered by the sea and sky, and of course by little feet endlessly running up and down, until they were smooth, and more of a ramp than steps.  I hesitated before I put my hand on the door handle, suddenly unsure.  I had been so resolute when I had told them I wanted to visit this place, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in.  I suppose it’s too late to turn back now, I thought to myself, and, taking a deep breath, I put my hand on the handle, and turned it.

I winced as the door creaked loudly, and as I looked inside, I was flooded by memories of my childhood.  How we used to play hide and seek in the house, until we knew every nook and cranny of it, and still we hid in the same old spots again and again, until we could get from any point in the house to any other point, with our eyes closed.  We squeezed every bit of exploration we could out of our hundred foot strip of beach, and we swam in the sea in all seasons, rain or shine, until we were nearly as comfortable in the water as we were on land.  I stepped into the front entrance and stood for a moment, listening to the sound of silence.  Then I took off my windbreaker and hung it on one of the old rusted hooks on the wall.  I removed my boots and put them on the shoe rack, which groaned in protest, but to my immense relief it didn’t collapse.

With socked feet I padded quietly into the living room, and I remembered how my father used to sit in his chair with a look of quiet contemplation while my mother curled up on the old couch and read while we sat at her feet, listening with rapt attention to the few stories we had heard so many times.  We used to fight over who would get to sit on the couch with her during story time, as we didn’t have any other real places to sit in that small, slightly cramped, but nonetheless cozy room.  It seemed silly now, that we fought so hard over something so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it had felt like one of the most important things in the world back then, and whoever won would sit triumphantly upon that old couch, rickety as it was, even back then, as if it were a throne.  I rarely won those fights, being one of the smallest of the bunch, but every once in a while, when my older brothers and sisters had a long day fishing and collecting shellfish and seaweed, I would get to sit beside my mother, and there I would sit, as triumphantly and imperiously as any of the older ones ever did.

As I, the house, and the rest of my family got older, my siblings began to move away from that quiet little cove by the sea.  At first, I didn’t understand why, why could they possibly want to move away from the cozy little house by the sea? By the time my oldest siblings began to move away, I already knew how to identify several types of sea life, and I was on my way to becoming quite proficient at fishing.  As the house slowly emptied, the cove began to change from lively and inviting to cold and lonely.  The only thing that stayed the same was the brutally unchanging sea, and the waves continued their rhythmic pounding, heedless of the change wrought in the cove they battered.  I held on longer than the rest, refusing to acknowledge that there was a world, and things worth seeing and doing, beyond the cove.  Our cove.  My cove.  When my parents died, however, peacefully thank god, I couldn’t bear to stay there.  I called my siblings, every one of them, starting with those that I knew the phone numbers of, and getting the numbers of the rest from them, and after that rush, after I floated through the surreal experience of talking to these people who I hadn’t seen in years, but with only bad news to tell, after all that, I had gone and sat on the steps and listened to the sound of silence.  That was when the tears had come.

Coming back to the present after reliving these experiences, I discovered a cascade of tears flowing down my face.  I turned suddenly and ran out of the house, not even bothering to grab my coat and boots, and once outside I stopped and sat down on the steps, the tears still flowing freely.  The aftermath had been a flurry of activity.  There were funeral arrangements to be made, a will to be worked out, who gets what, various items left to various people, and, surprising no one, except, perhaps, me, the house was left to me.  But I couldn’t stay there.  Physically I could, I could sustain myself just fine, but I couldn’t spend my days there with nothing to do but listen to the sound of silence.  My siblings all supported me in a variety of ways as I made my way in a world so much larger than I had ever imagined.  Unsurprisingly, I became a fisherman, and I even started a shop selling seafood.  I was also a person with in-depth knowledge of the local sea life, and if anyone had a question about what to or to not eat, or what and when to harvest, they came down to my shop, which was also my home, to ask me.  I had held on to the house for as long as I could, but when hard times hit, my siblings had finally convinced me to sell it.

I walked back inside to grab my coat and boots.  I had been resolute when I had told them I wanted to come back here, and now I knew why.  I had needed time to stop, to reflect, to become at peace with it all, and, after all the bustling busyness and noise of life outside the cove, I had needed just one more chance to sit and listen to the sound of silence.