I wonder if I’m as loud as my cells and organelles.

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.

~

What did they do before they invented the silence?

What could they have done before its existence?

It must have been an impossible time, because I can never find it.

Outside, I hear the animals. Inside, I hear my fellow animals.

Even when I try to meditate and find silence with just my breath, I cannot escape the absence of the quiet.

I close my eyes and hear the sounds in the silence.

You can hear the buzz of the microscopic entities that surround us, the billions of them that rest on the tip of your thumb alone, the trillions of them that graze upon the bride of your nose. Every small reverberations from the universe (the universe we can see and equally, maybe moreso, the ones we cannot) that echoes and ricochet off the backboard of solid stone and rigid bodies. The cells within us hum, the organelles within them humming even softer, until the infinite number of the smalls things, all harmonizing in some tiny chorus, can make its way to our ears. And when I hear that whir, that odd static or shrill beep, I have it.

There is no silence in life, for when there is life, there is noise.

What did they do before they invented the silence? The answer is that they had yet to exist.