The Silence Room

This home, located in a back alley of the abandoned art gallery behind the city, had a door without a handle. Only a faint buzzing—the sound of suspended breath—was produced; otherwise, there was no sound. No superstitious person would dare to come, and the townspeople gossiped about it, calling it The Silence Room. Unless Elian is involved.

His tongue was a prisoner, but the words were brewing in his chest. A steel hand would fall over his heart every time he would have spoken his truth, colored his thoughts with muck, or sung what hurt him to his core. Of course, not literally. And that's what it felt like. He was terrified of ridicule. He feared he might be misconceived. He was afraid of being noticed.

Then he drew. Only at night, however. The sketches books were stored under the floors and the poetry in the drawers behind dummy backs. Whenever he thought of letting them out, ghosts of past sneers oozed into his brain: scathing laughter, eyebrow-raising others and egg-shell silence. Then the whisper.

He thought at first it was the wind between his bookshelves. But it started to form words, and became more distinct. Bring whatever you have in disguise. Move out of your fears. It went on till almost impossible to sleep. On a Thursday still wet in April Elian stood before the handle-less door holding his sketchbook in his hands like a fragile heartbeat. The door moaned upon opening with the sense that it felt presence and opened up in a chamber filled with echoes. Not great--music never played, pictures never pinned against the walls of time. They wafted through the air like isolate strings, glistening, looking.

Pulse-like was the room itself. It didn’t t give you any comfort at all--walls plastered over with invisible mirrors. In interrupted Elian. The room said speak. No voice. The feeling of command alone.

“I… can not”, said little Elian, and his words left him. The strings surrounded him and covered his body, his hands, and his neck. Could not breathe. His sketchbook clattered down, and flipped open to show him the raw side he had never shown before. A room answered. So, one drawing lifted off the floor, and hung in the air, and shone.

It ran into the air and became a window--how a younger Elian was mocked at, because he stuttered: because he attempted to declaim a poem. and another drawing rose up and over--his first heartbreak which he had never dared to state but by a smear of charcoal on canvas. All the pictures that he had put away sprang up round him.

Tremblingly he made an attempt to run, and found that the door had disappeared. There was no way of getting out of the room. The one rule is, of course: Expose, or perish. And there were the tears, not sufficient. And this is why Elian screamed--not out of his mouth, but out of the last thing that had never deceived him. His art. He ripped his heart with charcoal and ink, smeared pain to beauty, painted his pain to his silence in symphonies. It was swallowed up in the room. Then-- it bowed. The previously blank walls were important to shine Elian's truth.

And up came the door--his door--it had a handle this time. When he emerged in the city it was no longer the same. Or had he? People would stop and look at him not at him. One stranger paused, and asked, Is that drawing--your drawing? It touched me.” Elian smiled. He still shook a bit when he spoke and his voice was still a bit broken. But the fright? It did not shut him up any more. The room had been able to teach him that expression was not about approval., it was about release.

Now he had the Silence Room inside him. Not to capture his voice--but to show him what can occur to you in case you fail to use it.