THE DEBT OF SILENCE

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John has lived in the city for 10 years now. He left his family home in the village as soon as he returned from his mandatory youth service programme. He had worked various jobs but was still not happy with any of them. His salary was not much, not enough to take care of his basic needs, let alone save, and his dreams looked as though they were dead. He wanted to work for just a couple of years, gather enough money to start a business, and then retire back home. He started with a lot of ambition and hope, but as time passed, John could only lose interest in living. Every morning when he woke up, he wished the day would move fast and that night would come so he could go back to bed again. His life was so miserable that he felt less and less like himself every day. He was drowning in the noise of survival and disappointment.

John was finally fed up with everything and decided to go back to the village permanently, after ten years of the noise in the city. The sounds coming from the generator sets, the shouts of bus conductors, the noise from the clubhouse behind his home, and also the noise from worship houses close to his house that wake him up every morning and sometimes keep him up at night. The silence that welcomed him was a bit strange to him as well as terrifying, since he was already used to the loud noise of the city.

On the night of his arrival, he had a sleepless night; he couldn’t really sleep due to the change in his environment. The environment had become foreign to him; he was used to sleeping in heavy noise, but today, he had complete silence, which made home feel very strange to him. He will lie on the bed till daybreak, but can only sleep for an hour or less for the entire night. The night was very quiet, in comparison to what he was used to in the city. What usually woke him up in the morning was the call for prayers at the mosque or something, the songs and prayers from the church, whichever of them could beat the other to it. And without the call for prayers and the songs and prayers he was used to, he slept through the morning, not knowing it was already daybreak.

As soon as John woke up, he noticed something unusual about himself. Usually, when he wakes up every morning, he wakes up with a light headache due to the noise he slept through, but since the environment was quiet, he has never felt the kind of strength he was feeling that morning. He will go outside the room to find the house empty; everyone who was supposed to be at home has gone to the farm, and the little ones to their various learning places. There, he felt a sense of peace that he hadn’t felt for a long period. He realised that all his ambitions were tied to the town and the pressure of the city, and not what his soul required or needed.

With everyone gone to the farm and to their usual places, John decided to take a walk to the outskirts of the village. For ten years, his walks were a dash to catch the early bus; now he walks majestically like someone who is not in a heist, no smokes from exhaust pipes or the loud noise of horns and conductors, only a quiet and clear sound of fresh air, leaves and the birds. He sat by a stream and reminisced about how silence in the city was something one would buy, noise-cancellation headphones, or a very expensive apartment, but here, silence was free and not empty; it was filled with the sound of the movement of the stream and a quiet sound of the falling leaves. He realised that the business he was so killing himself to start was to buy his freedom, working tirelessly in jobs he did not like, looking around the village, he realised that he had given up his freedom to earn a life he wasn’t living.

At this time, John wasn’t feeling like a failure anymore; he realised he didn’t need a huge capital to start the business, and what he truly needed was the strength he felt in the morning when he woke up. He could start farming in the village, and right there and then, John didn’t feel as though the night should come very fast; he started looking forward to the dawn of the morning.

Thank you for reading through my post. My name is@rishagamo, and above is my response to the week’s prompt 28 “A QUIET PLACE”

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