Whenever the road by my house goes silent, it feels like the world has stopped.
The noise of cars and planes passing my childhood home was compulsory in games of tag and time spent on the trampoline. The sound of planes flying too low is the soundtrack of every family dinner and game night. Cars revving their engines on the empty road accompanied late nights and overdue assignments.
If that all went silent—if it just stopped—my world would spin out; every schedule and plan that I have meticulously organized would be irrelevant. Every school assignment that I have slaved over would become trivial in the split second that everything I have ever known begins to slip away. Every moment of unadulterated joy and sorrow leading up to then would feel incorporeal.
If everything truly halted, if it were still and silent indefinitely, I hope that it would be an autumn day—one of those days that I wish would never end, where the sky is powder blue and the clouds resemble the picturesque ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, when the grass is still soft and green from a warm, fruitful summer.
It would be one of the days that I am somehow always too busy to enjoy. When my homework is piled up and I have an indoor rehearsal. One of the days that I always long to bask in but am unable to.
I would take the time to note every simple beauty my life is moving too fast to notice. The way that crimson and gold leaves filter the sunlight and make the world warmer despite the biting breeze; the birds caught mid-flight, peppering the sky with their feathers of every color. I would slow down in the silence.
Perhaps I would hope that it would last forever or wish for it to end expeditiously. I wonder if the silence would turn as piercing as it was after I learned that the fantasies of my childhood had escaped me. When the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus turned into legends rather than real life.
If the world stopped spinning on its axis and the sun no longer rose and set, I wonder what things I would miss most. Would I miss the early mornings before competitions or the assignments that bring me to tears in the middle of the night? I wonder if I would miss the sky changing the most, for I would never get a new picture of the sunrise or sunset. Maybe I would learn to paint a sunset as beautiful as it is over Lake Michigan in autumn.
When it feels like the world has stopped—when everything is still and silent for just a moment—I wonder what my life would become if it halted. I ponder the regrets and hopes that would become irrelevant in the blink of an eye, but another car comes past. I can hear a plane overhead and the world continues—even if just for another day.
