in my head

Properties of Quiet

I was thinking the other day about this expression: "breaking the silence".

Let's say you're sitting in an empty room with polished cement floors.

It's not really silent.

The sound of your breathing, the rustling of your clothes, little pops and cracks of your joints as you shift, a random sniff from your nose; all of that is amplified in that room. But even then, the silence still isn't broken.

So now I'm thinking of this phrase: "you could cut the tension like a knife through butter."

They're not exactly related, but it makes me wonder if silence could be a tangible thing that conformed to all the properties of matter. What if it were like one of those shitty plastic rulers in middle school? I remember that back then, there were some boys who had a game of bending the ruler to see how far it could go, and if anyone broke one, another boy would slap them in the wrist with another ruler and rat them out to the teacher. It was all very fun and honorable. So what if silence had a breaking point like those rulers? All of the little sounds you make in that echoey room are enough to bend, but not break the silence.

And then you knock something over and the cacophony of sudden vibrations to your ears shakes you up harder than it should.

I guess technically, the threshold of silent to quiet is a change in energy. Or maybe the silence corrodes on everything like the invisible oxide layer on aluminum. Or maybe it's like dust; it settles on everything and makes it very difficult to speak.

But once you officially break it, or trigger the action potential,

BOOM NO MORE SILENCE

now ALL of the noise in the world is possible