Silence died a long time ago.

Silence died a long time ago.

There is no space left for emptiness, for breath, for waiting.

Everything must be immediate, everything must be now.

My hands ache, but they keep going. My eyes burn, but they keep going. My brain screams, but it keeps going.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore.

The satellite cables have tangled into our veins, and we called it progress. We carry the entire world in screens the size of a pack of cigarettes, but we can’t bear the weight of a single solitary thought. We learned to speak but forgot how to listen. What we feel now must be packaged into 280 characters, edited, filtered, trimmed until it fits within the shrinking attention spans of others.

I wonder: when did we become noise?

Words used to have taste. Voices used to have texture. Now, everything dissolves into the same indistinct mixture of information and exhaustion. Everything is urgent, everything is disposable. We love, we cry, we rage, we forget. The next viral tragedy arrives before we can process the last. The next trend consumes us before we can miss what came before.

And in the middle of this endless stream, what’s left of me?

I try to remember the last time I felt something without needing to share it. When was the last time a moment belonged only to me, without the urge to turn it into content? When was the last time I looked at the sky without thinking about how it would look in a picture?

Maybe the answer is in the silence we abandoned. In the pause we refuse.

But silence died a long time ago.

And I am still here, scrolling, clicking, consuming.

Waiting not to dissolve completely.