The silence of Fools.
If the night hides my flaws then I'll embrace the darkness and dance under the cover of my shadows.
Every day I was on trial, proscribed guilty or innocent depending on the words that flew out of my mouth. I've always been expressive, maybe too much, but I know that I speak my mind too fast and before my mind can catch up, my tongue has done its best.
Keeping quiet was one fatal flaw that I had, however hard I tried I couldn’t bring myself to keep shut. When the local chief was accused of embezzling the village funds I gathered an army of boys and visited his home. When he tried to speak, I called him the child of a whore. The gravity of the word was so extreme that once it rolled out my mouth, the silence that followed was deafening. Everyone knew that I had crossed the line. That night I slept in a tiny prison cell, listening to mosquitoes create a playlist in my ears. I wished I had kept shut. The consequences of my words came after the words, I often wished they came before, maybe I would’ve learned.
So I tried a trick hoping that’ll keep my mouth shut. I ate raw hot peppers. In hopes that if my mouth was in pain, I wouldn’t have the audacity of being rude and uncouth. For a while it worked, it was a quick-fix. But as time went by, I got used to the hot spice. The peppers began to have a very tiny effect on me. And so I continued in my old ways, expressing myself, getting beaten or jailed, and then returning and repeating.
Until one day when I met Alfa. He was a calm man. He barely spoke. For the first two months, he spent in the village, we all assumed and gossiped about his deafness. One day he spoke, and everyone was amused by the texture of his voice. The one other thing that stood out about Alfa was his brilliance, even though he barely spoke, whenever he did, silence followed. And it remained moments after he was done speaking. We were the direct opposite, I spoke and everyone became silent out of disgust, he spoke and everyone became silent out of amusement. I was perplexed.
One day I summoned courage and asked him, “Alfa, how come you speak very little in a world full of things to talk about.” He stared at me, and gave his usual smile, before speaking, “I speak very often.” I laughed and accused him of lying, he looked at me again, this time intensely, “I speak so much in my mind, but the words never make it out of my mouth, not because I do not have things to say, or wish to be heard, but simply because I’ve learnt that silence is the only way to protect my foolishness.” I left him that day with the obvious realization that I had been a fool, for failing to protect my foolishness.