Silence – The Relationship with Self – The Writings of Tom Grasso

I frown at the thought of mothering yet another pitiful episode of the mad wonderings in my mind that create a sense of insanity outside of it. Still, when faced with the combined sense of being misunderstood and misunderstanding I cannot seem but help to give birth to such a monster. Gone are the thoughts of rosy sunrises in which we hold each other tightly. Gone are the cascades of kisses thrown around as if they are candy during an Halloween parade. Enter in this scene a morose feeling of incompleteness and solitude combined with fear and a sense of ineptness only experience in both could understand. I don’t sense you have this experience and therefore do not have this understanding. I am happy for that, for I love you with all of my heart and do not wish such a pain to be burdened by you ever in your life.

So I sit in silence.

Riding the wave has never been so hard. Caught between the break and the riptide I am slowly losing my way from the shore. I claw at the water to no avail as the sand and stone fades from memory into nightmare. I drift away into the nothingness from wench I came, into an abyss so dark as to suggest it cannot exist. To what do I owe this moment? Is the “self” I was being so bad as to justify the hell it has been cast into?

The answer is silence.

I once heard a voice that seemed to inspire me. I once felt tears that seemed to move me. I once heard cries that caused me to look inward. Now all I hear are echos from my own mind. The voice now rejects me as if I were poison. The tears now sting at my soul and keep me from being able to open my eyes. The cries now are gone and have been replaced by nothing that matters. I sit here, a soul of wholeness amidst the broken chains that bound me. The chains only rattle, they do not hold me. The links fall to the ground as broken shards of a heart once kept whole by the anger that imprisoned it. It’s funny how the bars of the prison can keep the monster whole until the bars fall and the beast explodes, no longer existing but as a fraction of itself.

Its roar is now silent.

Oh little boy, scarred by those who claim love, brought into the darkness by those who claim to know the light, who do you latch hold of when the coldness comes? Who is your savior when you sin against your fairy tale? Who is your executioner when you are no longer needed to be whole? Time, my friend, will answer these questions. Time, my son, will teach you truth. You will come from solitude and be taught who you are only to find peace in the absence of everything you were taught. You will rebel against who you are in the hopes of finding who you are. You will cry, you will scream, you will grasp at nothingness until nothingness is all you know. You will hear a voice that inspires you, you will cry tears that heal you, you will hear cries that cause you to look inside of you. Through all of this noise you will see the honesty in its absence. Through all of the clatter and instruction and direction and conditioning you will see the beauty of the what comes before and after the thunder.

You will smile. You will love. You will know silence, and in silence you will know your self.