The Needed Silence

Sitting on the train, she thinks that everything has become so real that it almost feels as though she has cut all ties with reality. It is odd; everything appears strange and ordinary at the same time. Any incident, any fragment of reality, seems to reach her from a distance. She knows she is living. She sees dusk and dawn. She remembers the disturbed sleep. She notices the seasons changing; the leaves turning yellow, the wind returning, the familiar walking routes, the passwords she needs to keep in mind. But where, exactly, is she in all of this? How long did any of these things take? The days blur into one another so completely that they begin to feel almost nonexistent.

Perhaps it will get better. Perhaps it will not. There is a strange feeling of standing outside the box everyone else seems to fit into, and sometimes the distance becomes so great that she does not even want to look inside. She is afraid of expressing this feeling, afraid of how easily it might be translated into failure. There is shame in not being able to perform being human in the way a human being is apparently supposed to. Isn’t there? She has already butchered herself with that thought before anyone else gets the chance.

So she keeps most of it to herself. From the outside, she seems to function well enough. These are only train thoughts, she tells herself, produced by fields passing outside the window, strangers sitting opposite her, and the tempo of things disappearing before she has properly seen them. She knows this is a lie. But sometimes believing a lie is easier than searching for a truth that feels inaccessible.

She looks down at her dirty boots, which she forgot to clean. There is that familiar idea that you can tell something about a person by the shoes they wear, and she wonders how disordered she must appear in other people’s eyes. Then another thought interrupts: is she even visible enough to be judged? She almost smiles at strangers, but few of them smile back. In the subway, between supermarket aisles, when accidentally running into someone, when giving up her seat on the bus. Smile, smile, smile. Nonexistence, nonexistence, nonexistence. The world becomes too loud. What is a person supposed to do when their own existence feels like a car horn on a Sunday morning? She wonders about this while lifting her backpack from the empty seat beside her. The train is approaching a station, and soon the doors will open and a wave of people will come in. Someone will sit beside her, perhaps going through a wave of train thoughts of their own. Someone like her, or someone entirely different.