Kino enjoyed listening to whatever music he liked and reading books he'd been wanting to read. Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

I recalled clearly what I’d seen deep within her eyes. A dark space, frozen hard like a subterranean glacier. A silence so profound it sucked up every sound, never allowing it to resurface. Absolute, total silence.

I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence. However, if we were constant;y talking year-round, and telling only the truth truth would probably lose some of its value.

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears

A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.