Rising

The city was silent most of the time.

I had so easily learned to ignore the useless noises of the humans that the world seemed silent to me most of the time, an amplified version of a church during the last moments of a funeral, so quiet that my ears rang. Most of what I heard were the nothings, words mumbled under the breath of nearly every soul, unintelligible things that made no sense. Those were my favorite, even if it was a simple oh or shit or something else, a curse or an expression of complete amazement or total horror. The last words of a dying soul, whispered and choked and so terrible sounding—these words floated in and out of my mind like the waves rose to meet the shoreline and the sun flirted its way through the sky every morning until evening, sometimes echoing off of the edges of my mind. Some echoed for days and days. Everything about the city was silent to us, just silence and the blurred edges of old souls. I never stayed there for long. The silence and the loneliness of being in a city filled to the breaking point with flickering, dying souls hurt more than carrying the memories of my least favorite things: death and dying and the faces, bent with agony and terror. I only stayed as long as I could stand within city lines, and that was never very long.