Not the way you used to write about it in middle school, when you proudly used
the idiom “hear a pin drop,” but the quiet that cradled Troy as the city fell
asleep, the moment of calm before the Greeks emerged from their wooden horse and set 
fire to everything they saw. It is an empty house after a mother closes the door
behind her first born son who is walking away to fight a war that was never his to fight, it is 
the months that he does not write back. It is a little girl who stops talking the day her father 
dies. If you listen closely, you can hear it in a room full of people who are speaking when 
they have nothing to say. If I lie absolutely still, it is not hearing my lover breathe next to
me during the 4 a.m. quiet. Let me tell you about silence. It is the body of our greatest fear: 
absence.  

Norashiqin Toh has her life split between two continents, loves and is loved. She was part of the 2012 OF ZOOS Summer Workshop.

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