Trigger warning: anxiety and OCD

~~~
You sit by an open window and close your eyes. You smile at the gentle caress of a passing zephyr, tap your fingers to the susurration of crisp autumn leaves, drink in each melodious note sung by the neighbouring family of sparrows. Next to you on the couch, Mother is reading a book to your littler brother. The soft scritch, scritch-scratch of pen on paper comes from the dining table, where Father works non-stop on another set of equations. A warm feeling—thick and sweet like honey—douses you, and it makes you feel drowsy in a good way, as if you are an innocent child being swayed to sleep within a mother's protective arms, blissfully ignorant to anything but that wonderful cosiness. It feels good, and you let it sink and settle at the bottom of your stomach.

Quiet. For one rare moment, the world is quiet.

It isn't exactly that the world is silent, nor is it that the world always has a speaker blaring in your ears. No—in fact, these words conventionally used as a description of the amplitude of sound do not hold the same meanings for you. They are independent of anything from the external world, instead something (a feeling? A sensation, perhaps? You could never really put your finger on exactly what that something was) that came from deep within. Quiet is everything that is serene and peaceful and good and still.

And it is...well, it is here, for once. You cannot help but think when the next time will come.

And... you cannot help but wonder: this quiet you're feeling—what does it even mean? What does silence mean? And what about loudness? Maybe it is the sound of the stream of thoughts going through your head, like a river with ever-changing currents. Sometimes it gets so rapid, so loud, so overwhelmingly loud that it breaks the dam to the maddening bottomless spiral that went infinitely down and inwards and down and inwards and-

And that is when you realised your mistake: always when it is too late.

Every single goddamned time.

It creeps up on you, but not in the way a thief does in the shadows of the night. No—you are painfully aware of and utterly helpless against the taunting upturn of the corner of its mouth as it drifts toward you on its light feet. It gets closer and closer. Your heart races. Each pound travels faster and harder up your chest and around your throat and up your skull to wind and twist and turn and strangle your very body and thoughts and you're breathing but it doesn't feel right and a million of thoughts go through your head but none of them are yours and everything feels scattered and spinning and so incredibly fast and overwhelmingly loud and
you
are
losing
control
and everything is
drifting
and tightening
and-

Silence.

A suffocating silence.
Silence that is so overwhelmingly silent that the fullness of it is almost tangible.

You feel a breeze—cold, sharp, foreign—against your cheek. You open your eyes.

Nothing changed.
But everything has changed.

You realise, detachedly surprised, that you were still this whole time.
The world was still this whole time.

Mother never stopped reading to your little brother. Her voice, though unchanged, has become way too loud.
Father still has his eyes glued to the scribble-filled paper in front of him. The sound of his pen—scritch, scritch-scratch, scratch-scratch—felt unexplainable wrong, the rhythm uneven and incessant in your mind as if it was a broken record.
The sparrows screech a discordant series of brash, piercing notes. Each individual sound rings in your ears, building and swelling till your head hurts.
Autumn leaves rustle harshly, like sandpaper on a chalkboard. It swirls into the cacophonic stew of your mind.

This is loud. But you are silent.

And now you realise your finger still taps on the window frame. It doesn't feel right, so you stop and tap with your other finger. The pressure isn't the same. So you stop and start over. Tap. Tap tap. Then the other finger. Tap. Tap tap. It still feels weird. You press your thumbnail into both forefingers until the pain is so dull that you cannot feel the difference in pressure. Then you do the same with all the other fingers. You squeeze your fists tight.

The tap, tap-tap rhythm joins the dissonant symphony of the collective screaming of Mother's voice and Father's pen and the damn birds and the stupid leaves still playing in your head.

The feeling trapped inside of you is hot and sticky. Like melting putty in your brain.

Suddenly you realise how weird this all is. That this —whatever this is—is clearly, absolutely and definitely not the conventional definition of normal. This is abnormal. And this is you, or at least created by and inside of you. And whatever 'you' are, that makes you, by default, abnormal.

The familiarity of the epiphany—a secret discovered countless times yet always surprises—that all this time, this happened to you, is only known to you, only felt by you, drains something out of you.

You feel empty. Hollow. The memories of the warm fuzziness and the burning stickiness are all but ghosts haunting a soulless shell.

Nothing is changing. Everything is changing.
And all that is left is silence.

An empty silence.

Silence that is so overwhelmingly silent that when you grasp for it with your outstretched fingers, aching for the illusion of quiet, you realise that there was
nothing
there
the
whole
time.

A/N: This was written from my own experiences, but I must credit the inspiration of putting it into words to "Turtles All The Way Down" by John Green. There's not much I can say except that though some consider it to be 'basic' and 'clichéd' (the romance is in a way, but so many other things about the plot make it different) it's like nothing I had ever read and I loved it. What I wrote does not convey what it actually feels like nearly as well as John Green does. So please. Read it. Thank you and goodbye.