Speak No Evil: Day Two
I go through the same morning routine as the day before. Get up, get dressed, get on the bus. As I get to school and head towards my locker, I find that it’s a little easier to get around my inability to talk. When people who don’t know about my project come up to me and try to start a quick little passing-by conversation, I manage to get through with a series of shrugs and nods, or very simple gestures that would be almost impossible to misunderstand. As long as the “conversation” doesn’t last longer than about a minute, I can get by. However, at around 10:00 AM I was confronted with a new problem that I hadn’t expected.
Being silent is really boring.
Talking came so naturally to me before this; I could almost always start a conversation with just about anybody talking about almost anything. I hadn’t thought about how much empty space there would be with my being silent. In study hall, My friends and I are usually a pretty talkative group. However, my being silent seemed to make the people around me talk less too. With us all just sitting there, in our own little worlds, I felt a little attention-starved. I had to do something to fill the void left by silence.
So I started going a little crazy.
By 10:00 AM on the second day, about 27 hours into my project, I became much more wild. When trying to communicate, if my purpose was not quickly understood I became frustrated and began to gesticulate wildly. I would soon be flailing my arms around like giant brown noodles for no apparent reason. Also, i would randomly start to mimic people. I would sneak up behind someone, and start to copy their hand and mouth movements, but with a contorted facial expression. In hindsight, I must have seemed insane.
Language is the foundation of humanity. Besides our apposable thumbs, the complexity and variation of our language is what separates us from the rest of the animals. Communication is such an important part of society, that when I suddenly couldn’t talk I felt cut off from the rest of society. This division was not easy to handle. I had to communicate in some form, no matter how primitive. And so if the only way I could communicate was to act crazy, then so be it. Anything to distract my mind from the stifling boredom of silence.
