So another way to frame silence is as listening to listening.

It gave our talk an unusual intimacy, as I was hearing mouths and not just voices.

It didn’t feel like death. It was quite the opposite. I thought about writing it all down.

We always find ourselves in between. Physically, we are commuting, on a drive, going for a walk. Even standing still, our bodies have the ability to cover great bounds held taut within. Mentally too, we are always on our way somewhere else, on our way to becoming something else. In the past few years, I have come to feel this liminality of the self more and more acutely. I am always both at rest and moving towards something. Ideas of authenticity have come to haunt my passage through this strange land that we continue to call the everyday. Everyday I am bombarded with messages that tell me to experience the real this, the real that. The world preaches a solid truth, an authentic something at the heart of it all that we can grasp onto with our own two hands, but how am I to grab at some solid thing, when my conceptions of I constantly waver? How should I fit myself into a point, when the I (the I that I am constantly becoming and then immediately discarding) exists more as an amorphous cloud suddenly shifting this way and that? The idea of the authentic self becomes some implanted dream that we dance circles around, stick-figure skeletons shaking further and further from the neon flames.

but you can be the fire burning,
seeing the lights glinting off the landscape,
while you wisp around,
circling, the fire in those very same lights.

Ghosts of old words still shine through.

They are the garbled messages of the past made physical.