Excerpt: Pictures Painted on Silence

I want to scream! I haven't heard my own voice in so long. I can't hear myself speak occasionally over the music in my head. I haven't heard my own real voice in years. I am still looking at the moon and I quietly begin to hum a tune. It's a dangerous prospect, usually singing or humming by myself brings the mad composer out from his sleep, and I think it infuriates him. I hum a song I always used to hum when I was a child. Not anything complex, just a little comfort song that I would sing in the car, or when I couldn't sleep, or when I would hear my parents fighting in the night when I was all curled up in bed. Gradually my humming morphs into 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star', and I'm singing to the moon and it winks at me again; suddenly, I'm the insane woman standing on the sidewalk in the middle of Chicago beneath the elevated train tracks singing loudly for no reason that my parents warned me about when I moved to this city. I don't care.

I am the crazy one.

I turn around, still singing and see the man I gave the money to just standing there and staring at me. By listening to his silence, I can hear what he is thinking. He is wondering to himself if I need that five dollars more than he does. But he looks hungry, and I'm so full. I'm so full of nothing right now that I'm bursting with the joy that it is bringing me.