Today’s Pocket Muse prompt relates to noise. Or silence. A penetrating, un-ending noise.

Or silence.

As I am thinking about this prompt, I can hear the various ear-worms that have infected my mind. “Let It Go” from Frozen definitely comes to mind. I only that song in my head for three months. Three excruciating months that every time I tried to get that song out my head, I told myself to “let it go” and the song just started all over again.

At times, I literally had my head wrapped in my hands as I kept trying to make the song go away and the endless and beautiful Indina Menzel’s voice restarted in my aching head.

But what is penetrating, that makes my skull ache, is silence.

That terrible silence when someone is mad at me and said something hurtful.

Or worse, I have said something hurtful.

That terrific, terrifying quaking of the heart muscle as it thrums in my chest. The blood surging through my ears and the arteries throbbing in my neck. And I just stare at Person X who may or may not be glaring back at me or may or may not be staring at the floor.

Or they are walking away and I am staring at the slightly fluted plane of their back, the light dip in the shirt’s center where the bent or angrily straightened spine

Or the silence that is wrapped in bad news. The moment I learn that someone I love has died. Or has a terminal illness. The unspoken words sputtering in my head because I can’t even stutter. Or am afraid of trying to speak because I will hurt whoever.

That terminal silence that hovers when I wonder why someone is mad at me (and maybe they actually aren’t but they’re just really busy). Do I call that person or reach out? But will my hands just get smacked and I don’t know why they would but the ice won’t thaw.

Or maybe there isn’t any ice and I am just being paranoid and the silence is warm and friendly and hovers like a butterfly riding a heated air swell.

I love the silence of the forest. Which is funny because as I think about the woodland silence, I can hear the wind sieving through pine branches. Bird song popping through the tree canopy. The crispy snap of a stepped-on-stick.

I love silence and hate it as well. That silence that inhabits loneliness is destructive. The silence that breathes in private time refreshes and enlivens.

A duality that lives simultaneously. A concrete glass wall. Heaving ocean waves breaking on a shore yet yield no sound.

My heart thrumming in my chest yet does not beat.