text: Her fingers fluttered along the edges of the blanket. She tried to process the words he spoke but she couldn't make sense of them. She closed her eyes and thought of a beach, the waves crashing against the shore, the screech of a lone seagull as the salty air howled and whipped across her face. "Are you even listening to me?" The boy inquired. "Yes." She kept her eyes fixated on the edges of the blanket, focusing on her fingers dancing in a rhythymic pattern along it, one step, two step, one - "No, no you're not. I don't know why you shut down when were talking but I've had enough. Let me know if you ever want to talk, actually talk, not just sit in silence." He slammed the door. It rattled the key hook on the wall beside it, and then... Silence. The thing she had craved for so long, and now it was here at her doorstep, and she was afraid. The silence entered the room and began to expand rapidly, distorting itself in shape and size, filling the air before her. She saw it as a large dense cloud ready to overtake he she did not know if she was ready to be consumed by it, but there was no escaping it now. The cloud hovered in front of her face, sending out tendrils to tauntingly caress her cheek. Fear began to grip her, making itself a tight fist in her chest. Her body felt heavy and tense. Her eyes darted frantically around the room, searching for an escape. They rested on the faded blue blanket that now rested in her motionless hands. The memory of the pair standing in the home goods aisle of their local superstore spring to her mind. Suddenly, words began to produce themselves from her memory. "We don't need that blanket, we have enough already." He smiled disapprovingly as she stroked the blanket, then folded nearly on the shelf. "Yeah, but we don't have any as soft as this. Just imagine curling up to watch a movie under this. Our place won't be home without it." She had already taken it from the shelf and placed it in the cart. " I take it we're not leaving here without it?" "Nope." "Oh, alright..." The words from her memory began to overtake the cloud of silence, pushing it farther from her and reducing it's size. She began to realize she could get rid of the silence by living in the past of the room, letting the memories of the objects around her fill the air. The bookcase alone contained many stories of the past, ones that could squander the cloud of silence, that could protect her from it's grasp. What am I doing? She thought as she closed her eyes again. She did not want to live in the words of the past, nor the present, nor the future. For the longest time she had craved the pure simplicity of the quiet, she had dreamed of being engulfed in it, and now the opportunity awaited her. As she sank into the couch she thought again of the beach, the waves still and noiseless this time, the sky cold and grey and unwilling to permit any noise to escape. The dense cloud surrounded her once again, and as she began to open herself up to it, it submerged her into her new reality, one that was filled with silence.