survival of the fittest

my mother would call it 'walking on eggshells', but I learned from a young age how to go unnoticed, a spectre in my own space and under my father's roof. we had to be devoid of childhood feelings, no giggles from secret languages and notes or shouts of sibling spats or clattering Legos or anything that represented the inconvenience of our emotions.

in my house, there was no survival of the fittest. there was only survival of the quietest, the least inconvenient to exist.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking stupid? You're supposed to be upstairs. Go back up there and so help me God if I hear one SOUND out of you you're going to wish you'd never been born," with a significantly pointed finger at the top of the cherry wood filing cabinet, boasting a stack of files and a belt and the world's largest copy, at least in my eyes, of the Oxford English Dictionary.

moving in silence keeps you alive. it keeps you human, it keeps you inside your body and most importantly it keeps out everything else that invades the only safe space you have - the quiet of your own mind, tucked into the darkest corner of a bedroom just above the study in a 250 year-old house with crooked & creaking floorboards, flipping each page as silently as you possibly can and tiptoeing, even in the middle of the day on a Saturday in the summer, across the floor only if you dared to get another book or to quietly use the bathroom tucked away in the opposite corner of the house. and God forbid that you get a two-inch splinter on your way - socks are a must for moving in silence.

the silence is deafening. but that silence means survival, and safety, and the assurance that, for the moment, at least, everything is okay, even if you dread the moment when that silence breaks like a crack of thunder.