Social Distance
On the domestic violence of silence, intrusion of digital messaging into human communication and dissimilarity of social and physical distance
Her silence would not have disturbed him to the core of he didn’t so regularly hear her having phone calls with unknown others. Though the thin wall proofed barely any sound, he couldn’t remember a single topic of conversation which had flowed through that wall like alcohol across the membrane between the blood and the brain.
He had become intoxicated by the presence of a person who’s existence was known to him mostly through absence, which became even more of an absence in his presence. It was as if his own existence diminished hers, forcing her into silence as she could not speak herself into personhood while simultaneously addressing him, yet when it was one of those mysterious callers her existence was unmistakable through that vexing leak of words which he heard too clearly but never remembered. And so she said nothing while she cooked and he reclined on the kitchen sofa, and said nothing while he cooked and she hunched over a laptop on the kitchen sofa.
Her silence occasionally broke when she asked, alright? But was she asking or just saying it? And sometimes, maybe, she said hey, or hello, definitely some sort of…
