Mlle Dy,
Je apprécié notre classe. Je savant tellement. J’aime savoir presque le langue Français. Merci pour étant patient avec nous. J’ai toujours desire à savoir Français. Vous êtes un bon professeur.
J’espère nous voyons vous encore. Dieu vous bénisse, mademoiselle!
Votre étudiant,
Yanna
The sudden silence reminds me of fleeting. Fleeting both as a verb and as an adjective. The sudden silence envelopes me though it does not know what to do with me—should it haunt me or set me free through a night’s sleep?
It is morning, but no one is awake. It is half-past two. Soon, the sun will peer through the dark and I will lose the sudden silence. I want it because engulfed in it I can hear my every thought, but I fear it for the same reason. I fear that this silence will take me farther and deeper into uncharted territory than I could ever want my thoughts to take me.
In a few hours, I will be seventeen. Seventeen. Right now, I am sixteen, but in a matter of hours I will forever lose the right to say so. I am sixteen, I am sixteen, I am sixteen. I am wearing those words out while I can. I will never be sixteen again. I am truly grateful to God for the opportunity to have been able to say that I am sixteen, and that tomorrow I will be seventeen.
This is a unique sort of sudden silence—for me, at least. For some people, it isn’t. It is the sudden silence that takes over after I have been surrounded by a whirl of happy, noisy people that slowly say their goodnights then reluctantly trickle away.
I am struck by how sharp every emotion pierces me in the sudden silence. It is ironic because thoughts hit the most precise targets in the acute darkness of the night, as if the all-enveloping shadows give them sight. They see for themselves, feeling their way into the very seeping-holes that I try to hide in the daylight; little knots that come undone at night, when I am most vulnerable to everything.
I am so vulnerable right now. I ache. Deep sighs only relieve me momentarily; the weight on my shoulders comes back almost instantaneously.
This is why I should never be alone. I should never be alone because I am swallowed whole by my thoughts. There is too much space in my heart—it is space that will never ever stop growing. I am always in need of new, bright things to fill up this space. I am greedy for all that is truly and deeply beautiful. I ache for every kind of love in existence. The space in my heart will never stop growing; it will never stop striving to accommodate everything and everyone I let in. Perhaps it will grow so big one day that it, too, will swallow me whole. Perhaps it already has.
But I cannot stop the growing of my heart any more than I can stop it from beating. Both are rhythms that will only cease on the day I die.
Lord, won’t You fill me up to the brim? Then maybe the silence would not feel so sudden when it swiftly comes.
Sixteen has been sugar-sweet.
