It Was Never Just the Silence

Silence isn’t just the absence of sound. It’s a memory. A room you once sat in. A time when the world didn’t demand so much from you. When you weren’t a collection of notifications and logins and "just circling back" emails. I used to walk through my neighborhood and hear birds, wind, maybe a dog barking two streets over. Now I hear leaf blowers and someone’s Bluetooth speaker doing a bad job at being a café.

I miss the early 2000s kind of quiet. Not the kind where nothing was happening, but the kind where you didn’t feel like you had to know everything that was happening. You could miss a call and it would just be missed. No guilt, no blinking dots accusing you. If someone needed you, they'd try again. No one tried too hard back then — it was okay to be unreachable for a bit.

Back then, silence had a weight to it. Like a blanket, not a void. You could hear your own thoughts. And sure, they weren’t always kind, but at least they were yours. Now I find myself thinking in other people’s voices — things I half-read online, opinions I didn’t ask for, content meant to fill me but leaving me more vacant. It’s loud even when it’s quiet.

Sometimes I sit in my apartment and turn everything off — phone flipped screen-down, laptop closed, not even music. And even then it takes a good twenty minutes before my brain stops buzzing. Before I can feel like a person instead of a node in a network.

I read once that silence can lower blood pressure, that monks don’t meditate to think but to disappear the thinking. To let the self be something that breathes, not performs. That stuck with me. I don’t want to optimize myself anymore. I don’t want to keep track of how much water I drink or gamify my sleep or make a to-do list for my rest day. I want to hear the fridge hum and feel like that’s enough.

We treat silence like a problem. In conversations, we rush to fill it. Online, we post into it. On the phone, we panic if someone doesn’t speak right away. But silence isn’t awkward. We just forgot how to be around it. We forgot that quiet can be its own kind of intimacy — like sitting beside someone you love and not needing to say a thing.

There are sounds I miss that I didn’t know I’d lose. The long dial tone of a landline. The way a CD skips. The thunk of a VCR loading. The shh-shh-shh of sprinklers at night. These sounds weren’t just background. They were proof of time passing gently. Not this now-now-now rush we live in. Not this infinite scroll where even silence gets pushed down by something louder.

I don’t know if we’ll get it back. Maybe silence like that only lives in memory now. But maybe that’s enough. To remember it. To protect what little we can still find. To stop apologizing for not being constantly available. To stop thinking presence means response.

It was never just the silence. It was who we were inside it.