absolute silence

Silence frightens me.

Music must play, a window must be open allowing the birds' songs and the wind's whisper (or roar, if we speak of this past week) to fill my silent spaces. I am selective about the sounds surrounding me; if they drone too much or are too interruptive, they will not be tolerated.

Snoring has long been an unacceptable nocturnal silence substitute. As I child I dreaded family trips because we would all stay in one motel room and I could never sleep due to the severe snoring issues my father seemed to suffer. Ever since engaged, I have rarely been able to sleep in the same bed as my husband, likewise due to his snoring. This has found me sleeping the majority of the marriage, until separation of bedrooms, on the sofa; in hotels, in the bathroom on the floor or out in the car; and in Sweden in the TV lounge of the apartment building. Some say that snoring, as one becomes accustomed to the partner they love, comes to sounds like the sea. I have yet to find that appreciation for such midnight sounds.

When in my home music reaches to almost every corner, especially when I am alone. I grew up in a home where music always played from an old phonograph stereo of my grandfather's, that still to this day is functional. The apparatus through which the music flows doesn't matter now; I must have music playing.

The sound of human voices is also comforting to me. Most comforting is when they are calm, controlled conduits of peaceful coexistence. Now that my children are older and conversant, it is a pleasure to have two intelligent beings in my company that I can teach to opine and to effectively express their thoughts, and let them teach me so much as well.

Yesterday was a silent day, but in a very different and eerie way. I went to the gym in the morning and had a wonderful workout, but nobody spoke to me and neither did I speak to anyone else. Normal for my gym. I returned home and my children were awake, downstairs in His part of the house, watching Saturday morning cartoons. I showered, prepared breakfast, and put myself hard to work on editing my book. That lasted all day, without a single word exchanged with any other human being. I had my Saturday programming on through NPR, but those voices were not speaking on a conversational level with me, personally. It was a radio broadcast.

The sun rose and fell, and it was not until 8:00 last night that I spoke with anyone but my cat. The silence--I must accustom myself to this silence on my weekends without the children. Even if I leave the house, I am often surrounded by impersonal silence as so many in public are engrossed in their own worlds they don't even excuse themselves if they bump into me when dialing or texting on their Crackberries. Sure, sound abounds, but taking the form of the normal drone of daily life, shopping, cell phone conversations--almost anything is more interesting than what is being lived now, or the avoidance of certain silences for fear of having to figure out how to fill those spaces, or fear of having to interact with others outside a comfort zone.

Perhaps I see silence as an abyss. Many see silence as a refuge. How do you see silence?