Silence is Golden

On the surface, nothing had changed. The world still looked the same. The birds still sang and grass still grew. It didn’t look like the barren wasteland landscape of all those post-apocalyptic films I’d seen when I was a young girl. There were no warlords, people were not hunting each other as a source for food, and the world had not fallen into financial ruin. The death rattle of society was not screamed by half insane men dressed in leather and painted in chemicals nor was it shrieked in hunger by zombies emerging from hidden places to grasp desperate living humans locked in a constant state of terror and survival.

And yet, everything had changed. It just hadn’t been on the surface, that’s all. Perhaps that’s why most of us still haven’t noticed that it happened. There was no cataclysmic event that drew the world as I remember it to a close, launching all those that survived into a harrowing life of desperation and survival of the fittest. Instead it happened gradually. Bit by bit. Moment by moment. One small change or event at time. Like the light suddenly fading at the end of a long day, surprising you with night fall because you were simply too busy looking elsewhere. Too caught up in the mundane tasks or distracting details of your day to day to notice that the world around you was changing.

“Auntie, are you ready to come inside yet?”

It’s Moira, my niece, coming to collect me and take me back inside from my chair on the porch. I sit here daily and watch the birds in the elm tree and the bees on the dandelions that have taken over the small postage stamp of a lawn brown and dry with neglect.

“Can I stay a bit longer, dear? I asked, tentatively. It hadn’t gone away yet. I needed more time.

Moira’s exasperated sigh came from the shadows of the entryway besides my ragged screen, “Fine, but we have to watch soon, Auntie. So not much longer.” She sounds tired and irritable and I can’t blame her. The world has worn hard on her shoulders, much like us all. I can hear it in her voice always, a sharp edge that always balances close to cutting the thread that can unleash unexplained anger. This is how everyone sounds now and my niece has more reason than most. She has been punished with the burden of being my steward now, a duty forced on her by the state.

“Thank you.” I say gently and timidly. The verbal equivalent of a pup showing its belly in submission to a grumbling adult dog. I need a bit longer to make it go away, so placating her with sweet submissiveness is necessary.

My hands, dry and dotted with sunspots reflexively tightens around the gold locket I hold. I carry it in my pocket always. Moira stopped asking me about it years ago and I was grateful when she did. Its story, like so many others I carry writhes closest to the surface and it often begs to break free. I can’t let it. It carries too heavy a price. Stories like this one and many of the others locked inside my heart and memory are safer unsaid now. The world is no longer welcoming to stories that don’t fit the narrative currently acceptable. It silences them and watches those who know it closely to make sure it remains silent.

I was in my forties when it started, I think, though looking back, some of the small shifts were happening before that. I was just too young and absorbed in my own life to notice them as much. The media was already straying from reporting just news. All my sources of information for news around the world were slowly being replaced by talking heads arguing opinions rather than reporting facts. Social media snuck in slowly and latched on. Slowly we became complicit in our abject abuse of those who opposed or even appeared to oppose our opinions. Soon even social media sought to silence those by banning them or censoring their personal pages, taking down posts, and warning them against their choice of language or topic. Free speech was dead. It was the enemy, but whose side you were on in the media war didn’t make you right and other side wrong. It simply added your voice to the shouting match against the opposing extreme.

Rayna was my best friend. I met her at college when we were young and fearlessly optimistic about the world and our ability to change it. We were loud and unfettered in our chosen arts. Rayna was a performer. Tall, lithe, and beautiful with blonde hair and a striking green eyes, she turned heads wherever she went. She had a fierceness and presence about her that demanded people’s attention, even if they wanted to ignore her. Her voice could carry across crowds without a microphone and she could sing like no one else I knew. I had a voice too, but mine was carried out not in song or in speeches like Rayna’s. I was a writer. I wrote columns and later blogs. I even started a book. It took me years to write only half of it. I still remember the smell of the pages smoking as I hurriedly burned them in a large steel drum and can still feel how the drill vibrated violently as I screwed the steel bit through my computer hard drive where the electronic pages had been saved before tossing it in to the fire too.

What had we done? We had spoken out against them all. In a world where there are two sides on the extreme, the greatest enemy of all is not necessarily the opposing side, but those who sit in or promote sitting in the middle. Those who implore and try to reason between the two extremes for not a solution favoring one side, but a solution that supports both. A middle ground. This is what I wrote about until the early morning hours, a clove cigarette locked between my lips and a cup of strong coffee nearby. Rayna would often be sleeping on the couch having finally succumbed to her exhaustion after we had feverishly spent another night discussing and documenting our beliefs. We were young and fearless. I was the writer and she gave my words wings on that beautiful voice of hers.

I remember the night she gave me the locket. It was a throwback to our childhood and I am still not sure where she found it. A pair of necklaces, each gold chain holding a half of a heart stamped with “Best Friends” when completed. We laughed about it reminiscing as we clasped them around our necks. That same evening we went to the theater to watch a film. I remember the advertisements before the film demanding quiet from those in attendance. “Silence is Golden” the screen read in bold, glittering letters. I remember Rayna scoffing loudly “No it’s not! They’ll never silence us. Right? We have too many things to say and too many stories to tell!”

The birds have started to silence and the light is starting to fade. I hear Moira’s footsteps heading down the stairs and back onto the porch. There is a determination in them. She will insist its time I come inside now. She will pull me not so gently by the elbow and support me grudgingly as I shuffle back inside where she will place me in the old armchair in front of the television and order me to watch it while she makes dinner. It will be the same subliminal messages as it is every night. Fear mongering and warnings splashed in Technicolor splendor painting those who fight or speak out against the way things are in varying shades of villainy. Every statement will be coated with explanation and clarifying comments preventing offense to anyone, protecting that precious narrative the media has championed like a thick bundle of bubble wrap strapped around the most delicate china plate.

I will watch it dutifully, like a good complicit member of society. I will not offend anyone by sharing an opinion. There will be no scoffing. No rolling of eyes. Not even a question will be spoken out loud. The roaring of my own thoughts and the stories I carry will begin to rise again and with it the overwhelming sense of distress. Fear will grip my heart and knot my stomach as I watch the results of all those shifts and changes so many of us noticed too late are played out before my eyes. My stubbornness will threaten to wake and defy the mandated message of “obey and concede, so you don’t offend” and “if you speak out, you will pay.” My hands will itch for a pen and paper or for the keys of my keyboard. I will feel that longing to write the truth, my opinion, and the stories I carry. The image of Rayna’s face will swim in the unshed tears pressing against the back of my eyes.

I will not let them fall though, not with Moira watching me intently as she has been tasked to do, noting anything I might give away and reporting it to the committee that still calls daily looking for anything that may condemn me, even though it has been years now. At 60 years old now, broken bodily from the beatings I received at the hands of the enforcers leading up to my trial so many years ago you would think they would lose interest in me, but that isn’t the case. Writers are dangerous, especially those that stand apart or worse, in the middle and carry stories of people who are supposed to remain forgotten. We are no longer free to speak our minds and disagree and we are not alone. All forms of art are now under strict observation. The media runs I all and censors and tailors all forms of communication and expression. It all must align with the approved message and it must not offend.

Somewhere deep inside me my passionate, stubborn, younger self still lives and thrives. She hopes for a day to reemerge. I silence her and betray her with this silence. She screams from deep inside me every day. Begging to be set free, to be allowed her dignity to face the same fate of those whose stories she knows. My fear overwhelms her, encases her, and keeps her from surfacing. As I am put to bed each night I hope passionately for this to be my last night that I fight this battle. I hope for my sleep to take me out of this world and that I do not wake the next morning to fear and silence. I dream of seeing my best friend, Rayna, her blonde hair tangled in soil and her pale, lifeless hand holding her half of our golden locket, her blue lips silenced by the barrel of the gun they forced into her mouth for speaking out the words I had written, words we believed in. Censored forever and her story silenced. She was one of many.

If I do wake the next day, I will be disappointed and simultaneously overwhelmed by the building terror that sits at the back of my throat and writhes across my being. I’ll struggle against the knowledge that when I do die, my story and all those I carry that have been silenced will die with me and be forgotten. I will fight to keep this all contained until I can sit on the porch and watch the world go by – a world that on the surface, looks the same as the one I used to know. I will let the sound of the birds draw away the distress that chokes me all the while clutching my half of our heart shaped locket.