What Silence Does to a Body

"Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition."

But it's as if the soles of your shoes have found a home there and there's no prodding them from the quicksand that is your larynx. You have learned that silence equates to passivity and passivity equates to an avoidance of conflict, and hasn't that been your ambition since you were torn from your mother?

You wonder if you were ripped a silent baby. If they thought you were dead as they severed the cord not because you were tinted violet but because your vocal cords didn't shake like the white ones. Since then you have been welded shut to silence but you sponge all the things you do not want to.

All the double snaps that corroded the tissue in your neck because you could not believe the reality of your being. All the ordinary moments that are knotted together with a string around your throat that squelches protest inside of you. Decades of pressure are culminating in your trachea because you have sat still for too long.

That is when you realize that quicksand is so unforgiving because it has been settling inside of you for decades. You wonder how many shoes have been swallowed by it. How many shoes will be swallowed by it? There is ambition in your throat where there hasn't been before and you know that soon enough you will volcano, erupting onto everyone's silent feet.