I’m tired. I am so, so tired. The sounds, filling you up, encircling you in a flame, a flame so impossible to be taken out of. They fill your ears, your heart; they fill your eyes, make them water with the sound. With just the sound. The theater, the murders, operas. Everything. You go along with it. You play, you become the funniest person in the world. It’s not you. You trick yourself. It’s still not you. You want to be left alone. You want to surround yourself with the loud silence. The one where no one can interfere. Only in your dreams is that possible. Only in your dreams do you get to live your life, how you want to live it. Then, you are popped out, making friends, eating lunch, and doing what you have to do to stay alive, so that you can create laughter, and more noise.Wouldn’t it be lovely, just lovely, on that one single day, when you find that you can’t wake up; that you don’t want to. You can finally have peace. That beautiful silence. That’s where I want to be. Except all alone. No heaven and none of the opposite. Now how will I get there?









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Ring. The alarm. Crack. My hand, silencing it. It’s funny to think that we all unconsciously want silence. The alarm that wakes us, we want it to stop. We want to go back to the beautiful quiet of our dreams. So far, that’s not possible.

Today, a whole new day in total, everything changes. I am going to silence the world. The universe. Or at least the part where I am at. Eternal silence. How exciting.
I rise out of bed. Finally; one day where I have a purpose to get up. A mission. A mission for myself, and for the rest of my life. I am invigorated. Like a man, a normal man, who rises out of bed every morning and goes to work. But do I want to be that normal man? A normal man watches movies with his family, goes to parties with his wife. While I have no wife, parties and movies are loud. They don’t let you think. They are a distraction on what should be life. Simple. I will only be part of a normal man.
I am planning to commit a suicide that no normal man would dream of. That takes my status down. And with what I will do today, it starts plummeting now. And I still have not started.
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Everything is with me. My keys. The fake ID a fake friend produced for me. No matter how close I am to other people, I am my only true friend. I have no others. I drop a thermos in the cup portion of my bag. Coffee would be useful. I gather all the clothes that I can cram into a bag. It doesn’t matter that they will be wrinkled when I unpack them. No one will see me where I am going. Or when I get there.

The car stutters when I turn the key. One more sound that I will not miss. One more quiet added. On the biggest road in all of Seattle, cars honk. Sirens wail, and babies and children, and adults; they all scream. I disregard them. They scream about pointless things. I wonder, how loud is an ice cream dropping? It still adds weight to my ears, it still creates something I wish to get away from. Imagine 1000 ice cream droppings. How nice to get away from all that noise.

Finally, I have arrived. I turn the key of the car. I write a note, and attach the key. Why risk making noise with spoiling the car, and then building a whole new one, instead of letting someone just drive it around?

I exit the car, and begin the brisk walk to the employee’s door. I feel the sound of my shoes on the pavement. The sound of everybody’s shoes on the pavement. The sounds of doors opening. The sounds of doors closing. The noisy cars that honk, because someone stayed too long at a crosslight. Probably because they were busy partying last night, and creating even more noise in the world. I reach out, and pull open the door. I turn around, and look at Mother Earth. I whisper a small apology. “I am so, so sorry, Mother Earth. While I get to escape, you have to live with all these sounds, all these noises, for a long, long time. Forever.” Then, I turn and shut the door.

Silence only engulfed me for a few moments. Then NASA went back to life, with their loud machines, and their enraged bosses. Thankfully, those machines would help silence me.

I walk up stairs, turn hallways, ride elevators, and run around. If NASA is best known for their spacecrafts and is associated with space, then aren’t I eventually bound to land where I want to be? I roam around the big building for about an hour more. If I ask, people will become suspicious. If I don’t, people will start to wonder why they have seen me for the third or fourth time. I am tiring. The journey that awaits me, and how I will reach it, will be even more tiring. I have to find their space supplies. I bump into a door. Apparently, I have been looking down the whole time. The door is locked, but the card helps me open it. My stride has to appear confident, otherwise I will be kicked out. I don’t want to be this close to freedom, and have to lose it. When I’m in the air, nothing else will matter.
The main office is unguarded. I slip in. The place radiants the fact that I should not be in there. I, a perfect stranger. This office protects the whole of NASA. It can sense an intruder. Like a dog. But a dog has a bigger advantage. It can move, it can warn someone there that there is a trespasser.Thank goodness the office is not a dog.
All of their spaceships are unguarded. This place should have the ultimate security, but apparently, very few people try to break in and steal their shuttles. Well, there has to be a first time for everything. I observe every single one available. Apparently, NASA has been hiding A LOT of their rocket ships, and have used a bare minimum of the available ones. The sturdiest are lined up, with ropes and, oddly, plaques surrounding them. Some are small, but most of them are pretty big. I manage to look inside one of the larger ones, and I immediately choose to take a smaller shuttle. There are coils, ropes, wires, computers and a lot of a big technical mess. The smaller ones will be easier to control, and will cause less noise. I might even manage to slip away unnoticed.
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I jump in at last, and close the door behind me. Whatever astronautic food I tossed in suddenly doesn't look like enough. My brain then starts screaming that I am about to commit suicide. Why should I be worrying about food? Maybe - I fight back - it’s because I might be afraid? It just hit me. I might be afraid. But I still don’t want to die a normal death. I don’t want to have to buried in the cold ground, where people will just stomp their cold, loud feet over my grave. No one will miss me. I have no family. People will stampede over my grave, to get to their son, or mother, or their daughter. They won’t care that the cranky old man, who 100% lost his hearing (seeing how I would be dead) is under the ground, praying for someone to come and put fresh flowers on his grave. I have to stop. I have to quit thinking thoughts. The only person in this world who loves you is you. You are your only friend. You are the only person who knows what you truly likes, who will always be there for you. Again, I start to question this. The civil war in which my brain is currently engaged in does not sound like I am the only person who knows myself. It sounds like no one does. And with that I cry myself to sleep.
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My eyes are crusted and red when I wake up. Outside the shuttle, it is dark, and silent. I look over as to what I have become. A small, crying wreck huddled inside a small, tiny ball, wailing for the life to leave him. I came with a mission to leave earth, and I am here, as weak and unprotected as the newborn child. I have to pull myself together. And if that’s all, then I will. I do. I must get back to real life, so that I will be able to descend into the moon’s core. So that I can simply melt away, with happy and free thoughts. And that’s my motivation. That’s what will guide me through this crazy business. And so I get up, and I move about to stretch my legs. And then I quietly go raid the astronautic food supply, and the oxygen tank. I grab as much as I can hold, and stuff it back into the shuttle. I do this 3, 4 times. I don’t think about what lies ahead of me, only what lies directly in front. This creates less problems,and before I know it, I am trapped in the shuttle, and I am trying to teach myself how to drive it. Surprisingly, it can drive on the ground as well, so I turn it into the exit doorway, and drive down, down, down.
I'm outside. The air on my neck feels good. The way the seat of the shuttle holds my neck feels amazing. Everything has to be organized. That is the kind of person I am. The way a bagger at store would, I arrange everything in the shuttle. Then I walk around Earth, saying my goodbyes. Goodbye plants. Thank you for the oxygen. Goodbye buildings, that clutter. Goodbye, to the graves of my family. I’ll never see you again. But if Heaven is the Universe, then soon I’ll be seeing you. And goodbye noise. Never, will I see you again.
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My palms are sweating, and the controls are red. We are currently passing through the atmosphere of the earth, and, personally, I wouldn’t mind dying right here, right now. But I still want to see space. I want to hear the glory of silence; to experience it,and to die clinging to it. So I will. I will see it, I will acquaintance myself with it, and we will be one. And with that, I realised I have arrived in outer space. Now is where I must take care of finding how to land. So, please excuse me.
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I have secured the shuttle in a hole of the moon. The moon looks pale, with the sun’s help, and everything surrounding me is black, white tiny specks of white. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and most importantly, quiet. I put on one of the space suits, and open the door to the shuttle. I jump out, with my harness, and start bouncing up and down the Moon’s craters. This is what life should be. I so wish it was all like this…
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My life is now repetition. I sleep, I eat, and I play. Like a child. Then I sleep, and I eat, and I play. Over and over again. Then one day, I worked. I sat down, and I wrote this story. No one will ever read it, but why not try? I wrote, and I spilled my heart out. I didn’t have to worry that someone would stand over my shoulder and read my words, and laugh. Soon I will be dead. The food will run out, and so will the oxygen. When I am done writing this, I will step outside. Without a helmet. But before I do that, I will throw this into the Universe. Maybe an alien will find it, and will preserve it. Then when humans discover them, they’ll read this story. This was amazing, and my life will soon be gone. Goodbye, and good luck. - 7:32 (By my watch, which I believe stopped telling time correctly 4 days ago.)








- The Risk Taker
Epilogue
It was a rainy day out. She was running home, home to where there was a nice, warm fire. Home to where her brothers were gone. Home to where her mother was at work. Home, to where there was silence. Home to- THUD. Something landed from the sky, in front of her tiny, tired feet. She bent down, to examine it. Then she picked it up. It was a pile of papers, stapled together neatly. She would take it home, to examine it. She ran the rest of the way home, and made herself some hot chocolate. Putting the hot chocolate on the table next to the chair, she curled up in the chair, and began to read, the Risk Taker’s suicide.