The smell of silence

"Don't you smell? This place has a peculiar odor". E. used to make this enduring remark. Now few years have gone by, and the statement keeps making perfect sense; afresh and anew, as always.

The building was a shelter for graduate students, not many, about 50. Corridors and halls, stairs and elevators, rooms and labs used to be empty, entirely empty, immensely empty at least ninety something per cent of the time. Imposed on the background: the monotonous humming of the machines, fridges, little dispensers of DI water; the purring of napped computers; the sudden snort or beep of a sleeping clock. Finally, above all, the tremendous and suffocating sound of silence, engraved in a peculiar smell, indeed.

The leader and the friend of friends does not feel that deafening sound, no doubt, it could not be otherwise. The silence, however, feels like a thousand pins all at once piercing the skin of the naked hand for the abandoned, the disposed, the forsaken. The situation is hopeless, and in the case of the powerful and overall winner knowing the effect of this killing silence on the loser, this vast, isolating and isolated combination of silence and smell is an act of imposed cruelty.

(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).