Quiet

Minute Zero

The first thing you notice once inside is the noise of the outside. Even in quiet the outside has a constant humdrum of noise passing through the air. Even if you don't listen, we can still hear. Even if we can't hear, we still feel. Your heartbeat always lives inside of you, making noise every off beat. The rasp of breath always surrounds us. Yet, we never hear our blood pumping or our lungs deflating.

You hear it in here. Every tiny click or pop of joints. Every thump of your life giving-organ. Every exhale. Even your thoughts seem to be spoken out loud.

Minute One

You start off thinking the normal absent-minded wonders. Remarks about the absurdly cold weather for September, a complaint about a teacher, even a thought of anxiety waving in about your upcoming test, are amplified around you for you to ponder. Silence breaks in though- and oh, is silence compelling. It weeds out the fluff in your mind you put in to distract yourself from your problems. It breaks down the walls you've tried so hard to build.

Then you're left with the silence of your mind. Except, the problem is that there is no silence inside your mind. It's the constant noise of the city outside living in your brain. It's like a busy metropolitan with no quiet corner. There's no escape from yourself.

Minute Two

With your barriers torn down, your mind is like a tiny child- too curious for its own good. It ventures into the restricted section of your thoughts. It exposes the things you tried so hard to hide from yourself and put behind you. Honestly, that hurts more than the quiet.

Minute Three

"I hate you" ~2 years ago

"You are the worst thing to happen to me" ~4 years ago

"I love you" ~2 years ago

"You're dead to me." ~2 years and 3 months ago

"You ruined my life" ~5 years ago

"I ruined my life" ~1 year ago

"I want to die" ~1 year ago

"You're the reason I tried to kill myself." ~1/2 a year ago

Minute Four

It's funny how the same few phrases can circle through your head so many times. It's funny how each time they hurt more and more to hear. It's funny how they soon become daggers stabbing at you. Yet, most of all, it's funny how a couple of words spoken in the heat of the moment years ago can still haunt you today.

Minute Five

The fifth minute is when it starts to feel like you've been in there forever. It's when you start thinking about going back outside, where you can distract yourself again. The fifth minute is when minutes become hours and you long to hear your friends' voices again. And you, more than anything, wish you had brought a watch in just so you could listen to the hands, because the beating of your heart starts to get old.

Minute Six

Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump...

Minute Seven

You start to think that if you killed yourself in there then maybe that beating would stop. The thought occurs to you that if you just pull a Tell-Tale Heart then the beating might just stop! Didn't it stop for the crazy guy in the story? Are you the crazy guy in the story?

Minute Eight

The thoughts swirling through your mind become visions played out in front of you. Those are worse than the thoughts, which are far worse than the silence. You have to relive the worst parts of your life over and over. You have to stare into the pain on the faces of those you hurt. You are forced to watch their eyes well up with tears as you declare your hatred. You have to feel the sting of every single slap in the face you've endured magnified to the greatest degree.