Death, silence and all that

He’s afraid of silence, X tells me. He dreads it, actually. Pascal’s infinite spaces, the silence of the stars, all that. He loses sleep over it, he says, imagine, he actually loses sleep. He’s afraid of sleep’s little abyss of silence, he says, who talks like this anymore? Yet that’s all he wants, isn’t it? he asks, he’s tired, it’s late and he wants to sleep, he wants to drift into the arms of Morpheus, into silence, he says, but to get there he has to make himself fall asleep. Sleep is Charon, he says, sleep is the ferryman, no, sleep is the skiff and death is the ferryman, who talks like that in this day and age, he says, how kitschy can you get. That’s it, he says, it’s death he wants, isn’t it, sleep is the coin and death is the skiff, he says. No, sleep is the skiff and death is Hades, silent Hades, because death is silence, and that’s what he really wants, he says, he wants the silence which is death, he wants to die from himself, fall out of himself, fall asleep, drop dead, he says, he wants the coin, who talks like this nowadays? And yet he doesn’t, of course, every cell in him clings to life, he says, his life, tenaciously as they say, even if he doesn’t, though secretly he probably does, tenaciously as they say, what if his life were threatened, what if he got sick, he says, he’d run from death and cling to life like a child clinging to his mother’s legs. He fears death like he fears silence, the silence which is death, it’s ridiculous to talk like this in this day and age, he says, kitsch is all it is. No, it’s silence he really wants, says X, a final break from himself, from his own kitschy voice, but he’s afraid of silence, he says, of my silence. It interrogates him, he says, it ridicules him, he’s not man enough for silence, he says, for death, or life for that matter, he needs the comfort of his own voice like a mother’s lullaby, right, isn’t that what you think? he asks. It grinds him down, he says, this silence, it grinds him into sand, he says, he’s sand, sand in the desert, a sandstorm in the desert, a noisy sandstorm in the heat of silence, who talks like this, in the heart of the silence of the desert, in the silence of silence. Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.