Breaking silence.
Dears,
It has been a while since my last story. Life got out of hand as my enthusiasm and limitations of time didn’t cohere causing my prolonged silence. I am making more time for writing again though, there is joy in it which I want to have in my life. I will be continuing my auto fictional stories about Lu who is wandering through life looking for ways to die or at least forget herself. She meets all kinds of characters and ends up in situations where she learns about her aliveness paradoxically finding it in mastering the skill of dying.
These stories are based on real people and encounters. They are reflections of my life experiences written in fictions way of magical realism. Here I will be sharing raw texts which might eventually become something. It is a work in progress wherein I learn how to write and imagine.
Silence.
Lu was not always comfortable with silence. She falsely associated it with a negative space of not-knowing that had to be eliminated as soon as possible. Knowing was Lu's favorite state, and for some reason, since she was small, silence didn't present a possibility of being a source of knowledge. She considered silences as shadows of words, their backside that felt rather uncomfortable and even scary at times. Long, deep shadows cast onto nothingness, an endless space where things seemed to get frozen. The motionlessness of silence scared Lu, who was a natural mover. Words were her wonderful lianas to move around with ease.
Words had authority in Lu's meaning-making ammunition, which she desperately needed to survive. It wasn't clear why exactly it was so important for her evolutionary purpuse, but Lu never engaged with this question properly, as it would need some risk-taking and revision of her fundamentals, and she didn't have time for it. She was busy with dying.
She discovered that you can get away with and from anything if you know enough words. But while spending a lot of time in movement, mastering wordy jungles, Lu forgot to explore the space in between, in silence. Lu was moving further away from what words were telling her. If Lu stayed in silence for too long, words were moving away from her, taking with them every kind of knowing. Meaning was dissolving in the darkness of the shadow. Words were forgetting themselves, causing Lu disorientation and waking up ants on her skin.
Despite her complicated relationship with silence, it was luring her. Perhaps knowing became boring for Lu, and she was looking for new excitements. One day she ended up in the darkest place of the shadow, away from words, unknown territory of wander. Instead of her usual verbal pirouette, she decided to refuse the temptation, overcome the discomfort, and stay with silence for a little longer. Suddenly, she saw two bright twinkles cutting open the dark and glancing at Lu. There was something comforting about them, pulling Lu closer. Twinkles became two big eyes on a head of an owl. He was tracking Lu with curiosity without saying a word. She didn't want to scare him away, so her movements became slower and softer. Lu was also curious about this creature.
"Your name will be Dot, and you are going with me," said Lu in her head to not disturb the silence and not scare away her new friend. Dot gave Lu a subtle movement, which she interpreted as a smile and as a "Yes."
"I'll take care of you, Dot. Don't worry about the shadows anymore; we will share them. You will be my guide; I will be your shield."
Dot answered with a similar movement, which reconfirmed Lu's assumptions about Dot's way to communicate agreement. She felt immediate satisfaction, a wave of warm pudding-like wave entering her body, filling Lu with pride. It was the development of a new language that set it in motion. A language wherein everything was crooked, silences were talking, and words were silent. A new jungle for her to move in, and on top of it, she found Dot, who was quickly growing on her. In the meantime, Dot was mastering his non-words, expanding his vocabulary, and growing like a yeast dough on the sunny windowsill. Silence was slowly becoming home, welcoming Lu with peace and motionless movement.