Cacophony
There is a strange horror to cacophony. Once it begins, it offers a sort of effortless conundrum: join in or stay silent. Whatever you choose doesn't matter. Requiring nothing, it feeds and builds on those trapped within it. Lonely silences, easily broken, cannot quell it while attempts to overwhelm it only add to its power.
You can scream and shout. You can feel your voice in your head, but the moment it leaves your mouth it disappears into the static haze of a million voices more. A thing of chaos, the cacophony swims through us like a storm, enforcing silence through endless noise.
“And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock, and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, and I beheld him no more.”
— Silence – A Fable by Edgar Allen Poe
This is the curse of our time. We bury ourselves in image and in text. I consume multitudes daily, and it is never enough. I would devour you, just to hear your voice, to know you in the precious silence of a moment.
We cannot stop the cacophony. It has raged since we first built settlements on the plains of this world, and it only gets louder as time goes on. All I can do is pull you close in the raging storm and whisper in your ear, “We are still here.”