THE SOUND OF SILENCE
Prompt - The Sound of Silence : Write about staying quiet when you feel like shouting
Unjust provocation. Mental torture. Tolerance stresser. Peace breaker. All these things and more, and yet I had passed the test. I could be proud of myself.
I'd had a rough couple of years. Pressure at work, break up at home, death in the family. It had got to be too much, way too much, and I'd not been able to cope. But there was help, there was advice, there were friends and there were new ways to be learned. And I thought that the final brick needed to rebuild myself was going to be here. A Monastery of Meditation, deep in the Highlands, a place of peace and tranquility and mental regeneration.
A seven day vow of silence, a steady daily routine, a life in the slowest of slow lanes, bringing calm and a sense of order to my febrile mind. Smiling faces, gentle people, a life reduced to the basics of happiness. With five days gone it began to feel like this was the chrysalis from which I'd flutter away into a new and more colourful life, with needs shorn to a minimum, ambitions set aside. Until I saw him.
At the end of those first five days were allowed to watch a news programme on the last two evenings, so we would be up to speed with the world we were returning to. And there he was. The man who looks like the hate spawn of Lord Snooty and Heinrich Himmler - Jacob Rees-Mogg. A creature for whom even loathing isn't good enough. He was spouting his usual gibberish suggesting the poor should eat gravel and gay people should be transported to Saint Helena.
I wanted to shout. i wanted to scream. The noise rose within me with the force of an internal strangulation. i swallowed hard. I swallowed again to make sure. And I stayed silent. I shook with fury, but quietly, almost sedately.
The abbott smiled. He knew I'd passed the test. I could be proud of myself.
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