It’s quiet here. It’s too early for cicadas, but I swear I hear them. I hear them intermingling with three girls sharing the highlights of their weekends and the rush of engines on the roads nearby. A school bus, followed by a motorcycle, followed by a minivan. I hear their engines hum, pause, rev, and settle as they play chicken at the intersection.
Cars roll down their windows to share their music with the world, which I’ve always thought was odd. They either think people want to hear them, or they simply don’t care whether they do. Either way, it seems out of touch. At least one of the cars blasting music has decent taste: an old Queen song I can’t remember the name of.
Beneath me, the uneven stone (or maybe concrete?) is surprisingly comfortable. Wearing only jean shorts, I can feel the cool textured surface on the backs of my legs. I lean against the column, feeling the coarse texture through my cotton tank. I get it now, why people are always sitting here.
Settling in further, I let my eyes flutter closed and my shoulders relax, letting the tension melt out of my body. I’ve never been one for meditation, but I find myself breathing in deeply. The air smells like nothing. Usually, I can pick out the smell of something—food cooking nearby, flowers or freshly mowed grass, even the perfumes or colognes of passersby. And yet, here, it smells like nothing. Is nothing a smell of its own?
It’s mostly quiet here, so every sound that sneaks through the still air is highlighted. I clearly hear post-grad plans and dinner reservations and upcoming travel itineraries being made. One of them has a sister going abroad soon, and one of them has never been abroad in her life. There’s typing on a nearby computer in a pattern I recognize. It’s familiar, and so is he.
Eyes shut, ears open. I wonder if silence is a break for our ears or if it means they have to work harder, always looking for stimuli. Always waiting to be useful. Always searching for sound, the same way eyes search the darkness for visuals. In a way, silence means work rather than peace.
There’s a lot to notice in the relative quiet, yet I keep coming back to the conversation next to me. Another person might put on headphones and stack another layer of sound over their voices, but layers of stimulation have always felt like a tangled web of noise. With more than two senses working at a time, I find myself feeling overstimulated and overwhelmed.
The girls are talking about their weekend plans and what they’re going to wear to dinner Friday night. One suggests a pink dress, the one with ruffles on the hem. They describe the entrées at a restaurant downtown, one I might have been to based on their descriptions, but I can’t be sure. I feel an airiness in my chest, as if I too, am going to this dinner with them. Perhaps it is this—this shared experience of conversations like these ones—which brings me such peace: we are all experiencing everything for the first time, sorting through pieces of our lives in fragments of conversations.
And perhaps this is the core of the female experience: the late-night roommate talks, the early morning breakfasts in the dining hall, the recapping of a long week at the end of a long day. Maybe guys do this too, but there’s something about girlhood that feels so fundamentally rooted in conversation, in the sharing of experiences, and the communication of every feeling, thought, and question. I am hard-pressed to think of a person I’m close with that I couldn’t talk to for hours on end. These three girls are comfortable disrupting the silence with their joy, just as they should be.
I do my best to tune out the individual words because they’re not for me to hear, but I still hear their voices. The rhythm of them talking continues to bring me peace. More so than if it was completely silent here. Silence means work—unconscious but tiring work searching for sound where there is none. My brain likes to fill these gaps with sounds and thoughts and spirals of an internal monologue that takes advantage of whatever spaces are available.
And not feeling alone is certainly quite a feeling. Their voices, and the continued sounds of typing, remind me that this—all of this—is just the communal human experience. One we are all stumbling through together. Moments like this—completely normal, arguably boring moments—are the most raw, authentic, and human moments.
It’s quiet here—not perfectly quiet, but quiet enough, dotted with pockets of welcomed sound. Perhaps amongst silence there is a need for noise, and perhaps amongst noise there is an even greater need for silence.
