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Silenced to Speak

a few sharp sentences that bring the place to life: 

the hardest writing should be the easiest to read


pixi wuz here 

There is a blend of cool/harsh and warm/soft lights, disturbing as it washes the room in with a contrast of clinical depression and yellowing age—mixed with jaundice, depending on the night. The morning isn't much better either. The lights are usually turned off, and the curtains reveal the sun, streaming into 35% if the room, and turns it a 100% stuffy, with dust from the surrounding highways settling in slow motion, with silence so inconsistently spread across the 8 metre space, that it could be thick and hazy in front of the walk-in wardrobe, and virtually a vacuum of noise in front of the bed. The room seems unassuming enough with the minimum effort of portraying itself as clean. Two portraits are in a corner, facing the wall beside a wooden chest. 

There is a cosiness to it, as people talk and chat in the space, but on the flip side, it rears in its sinister phantoms, its slivers of personality hidden just in your periphery of senses. When you are alone in its maw, you start hearing the ones it hides— an old man, snoring softly behind the walls of the bedpost on a dull afternoon. eyes, lurking right behind the sliding doors of the broken toilet. Your own reflection, looking a little too perfect under the defined shadows cast by the mismatched lighting—the eyes of the room telling you that you are beautiful, deliciously beautiful, that you start opening your mouth to affirm your own smile, and feel your vocal chords vibrating in the silence.

but the loudest silence happens in the bedroom at 10pm. Your Voice will be silenced to lead a prayer. You will reverberate in your head as your lips mouth out words that silence you more, soothing wounds and plumping pillows for the peace of the family— they dream as though immersed in the numbing saliva of the room's silence, but your sleep echoes with interruptions, with unspoken thoughts burning against your cornea, scratching the back of your throat as you hack out thick phlegm.


The space between the bedroom and the roof is not creepy at all. In fact, it feels sad, the way that there are half drunk ikat-tepi coffees hung on beam-work. You can't believe how the columns in the bedroom can look so symmetrical and functional while the ones here are shoddy and at best, an eyesore. It's probably a good thing, then, that the place is dark. Except for the square trapdoor you ascended from. It floods with glaring light—from the ugliness of the naked top of bulbs you never saw from your vantage point below. 

There are no bodies, no animals, no insects as far as you can observe, though there are footprints caked in long unstirred clumps of dust, probably made by careless workers during the master-bedroom renovation 12 years ago. Stepping on supporting beams navigating between wires, you searched every corner of the slanting space, from the plaster boards below to the boarded roof above. There are no openings. No windows nor visible cracks. The skittering footsteps that had been thundering in this space between the ceiling and the roof — has gone silent. YOur dad calls from below: 'Is everything alright up there?'. I answered with star. The skittering is happening below, which was impossible to happen 

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