Calme

There's a restlessness in the quiet. Do you ever notice that? Everything unsettled is significantly magnified when we are devoid of distractions. I fill my world with color, music, knowledge, and people. Maybe I'm just trying to fill myself with those things. Quiet is easily pushed off, but each time it is, it grows quietly stronger as it waits for its time to pounce. You push your own mind off for long enough, and the moment it gets its chance, it will flood you with the unwanted.

Or maybe, it will flood you with inspiration.

I always thought it suited me best to be a social butterfly. In high school, I had friends in many cliques, a hand in every pot, and I never had a moment where I felt that there was no one with whom I could sit or talk. Life was structured, mindless, a routine. Deviance was exciting. In college, I see that deviance is often the norm as I try different things, different personalities, different friends, different lives. You are given your time to do with what you will- wether that be filling the silences or leaving them to grow. And I thought I had to fill my silences with others. That's what we must do at this beginning of our lives, correct? Meet many, choose many, discriminate few. I thought that I was supposed to be happy and outgoing all the time, and really, I am often like that. Sometimes, though, I'm not, and usually, I have no desire to meet people out of an inherent distrust I have developed of accruing friendships. It never works. Some say I have so many friends, others say I have few, and I say that numbers are unimportant. I learned that, anyways. I don't have to be constantly meeting people, and I don't have to want to be around those I do know all the time. I seek out my silences, I don't run from them. I love being alone, love going places by myself. I'm different, unique, quirky...whatever you want to label it, I have interests that just don't fit with most people, but that doesn't mean that I let myself die with the whims of those surrounding me. I'm content to be different, even if it means a fight, even if it means that I'm alone sometimes.

I'm just one of those rare creatures that, at the young age of 19, finds that I really love my alone time. I like the contrast in it. I am around people, by choice and by no choice, most of the time. Even being around one person is social exertion for me, because even one person deserves individual attention and to see my best self. So, I have to recharge a lot, be by myself, remember and remind what is truly important. It can be so easy to lose your values when there are so many alluring things trying to fill up your silences.

I write this in the special, breezy silence of a dorm that has just realized that a long stretch of classes lay ahead. It is an especially subdued, post-action kind of silence. It is completely different from the Friday afternoon silence of a college, one full of potential energy and the radiation of psyches ready to implode. Every silence, even if you must fight to create it, has it's own self-revealing merit. It's own way of asking for distraction and creating who you are. In all this, silences hold a stronger power than the loudest yell.

They are, simply, the quietest capture.