Silent Words

Words don’t reach their full potential when they are kept inside; when they swirl around in the mind like the smoke that goes before the lava in a mountain, only to be brutally silenced by someone else’s inability or lack of desire to listen, and therefore to possibly understand. Instead, they sit and grow cold in the swill of cooling passions or fester like pungent fungus in the still and quiet waters of the mind.

I heard once that words were thoughts, thoughts were power, and the pen is mightier than the sword. Too often we try to silence the power of others by silencing their thoughts. We cut them off in mid-sentence, overlapping their thoughts with ones of our own, as if our words were more potent, our thoughts more powerful. And we don’t even notice when the person silenced withdraws into himself, feeling powerless. We don’t notice that he quietly trades his tongue for the pen as his only outlet for the words that run around inside him, deciphering the silent state of his own mind. So we never find out where those words were coming from or where we could have taken them. We just don’t listen.

I’m alone with my silent words, that inside do no one any good but myself. And even for me they are a curse, because they are the fragments of my soul that I need to share with others. But others don’t seem to want them. Sometimes I encounter those who will graciously take the words I have to offer, smile, and feign acceptance. But later, I find those same words in trash bins under soggy bits of lettuce and used tea bags, or pushed to the back of a fridge behind the box of open baking soda that soaks all the flavour out of them.

And no one seems to notice, as I withdraw into myself, that I have touched the tip of my ball point pen to the tip of my tongue. They just tell me that it isn’t good to keep everything bottled up inside and pretend to coax more words out of me. But the words remain – silent.