It’s hard finding a quiet space in a ranch style house.
The walls are never thick enough, and the rooms are never quite as far as you’d like them to be. Whenever my mind requires complete and utter silence, the house if filled with the sounds of life and the act of living. I am selfish in many ways. Loud sounds and music disturb me, and I am completely comfortable existing in quiet spaces. I don’t require music to reach a specific state of mind, and television doesn’t quite cut it.
If I’m sounding rather narcissistic or antisocial, I assure you I am not. But I am someone very susceptible to the environment around me. Thus, I make quite an effort to construct it to suit my emotional needs.
But ranch houses are not conducive to “finding your space”. And living with your parents even less so. Because I am obsessed with pleasing everyone around me and meeting people’s expectations, I find myself relinquishing my needs for the sake of another’s. So when I need silence, and my family needs loud salsa music, I give in—and the music blasts. And all the while I think: “what corner of this house can I escape to?” and sadly the answer is usually: “nowhere”. There is no escaping your physical space unless you leave it. The same is true, in my opinion, with your mental space. You have to force yourself to leave a certain state of mind for the sake of existing in your physical space. There is, undoubtedly, a compromise that must be made.
“Where do you run away to to experience silence?”
Leaving your home means stepping into a universe full of car horns and distractions. Going anywhere will mean going somewhere. And that somewhere is rarely silent.
Where do I escape to?
I escaped to the bathroom. The only sound is the one coming from my fingers on the keys, and the vent above my head moving air through the room. Most days, there isn’t a place I can go to for quiet tranquility. But tonight, on this rather dull and uneventful Saturday evening, the bathroom is where I run away to.
Thus, I crouch on the cold marble floor. I wrap myself in my bathrobe, and type away. No one calls me. There is no laughter blaring through my ears. Instead, there is just me and my existence. And while I am sure that any moment now I will be dragged from this oasis, I relish my moment here. There nothing more peaceful that the anticipation of noise, and the savoring of quiet.
