My Parents Taught Me About Silence

my parents taught me about silence

but not the broken glass in the air kind

not the pain slicing through you

eyes welling with tears

swollen throat silence

my parents taught me about good silence

the kind that fills you

all of us in the car

no one is speaking

radio off

just the rumbling of the engine

and since I know the difference

I know that this silence

is not the one my parents taught me

my silence feels empty

I live in the barrel of a gun

that has just been fired

such intense emptiness that

it feels like the walls are caving in

a crushing

a bullet was displaced

somewhere in the fight and

nothing came to fill the gap

I live in a vacuum

in space, there are such cold, empty places

vacuums which consist of not a single molecule

in these vacuums, there is immense compression

as if the walls are caving in

a crushing

a bullet displaced

if you do not attempt

to hold your breath

or fight the compression,

you will maintain consciousness

for about 10-15 seconds

in this time,

you will feel the moisture leave your tongue

your heart rate will rise

your skin will turn blue

and your body will swell

it will expand

to twice its normal size

you will grow

but you won’t explode

your skin is strong enough

to hold you in

on the bad days,

I try to remember this

that sometimes,

we can only grow

when it feels like we can’t breathe

when your heart is pounding

when the silence is so intense

it will kill you

but the reason that the

human body can not survive

a vacuum is not that it is weak

but because the oxygen flow stops

so remind yourself to breathe

but don’t hold your breath