Do you ever just crave silence?

Like, you're normally able to function best with music coming from somewhere. Lazy afternoons spent with a glass of ice-bland iced coffee, a pack of reds, and a bunch of equally lazy friends easily become (some of) the best moments in your life with whoever's Spotify playlist blaring out the speakers. With your current favorite song mindlessly played on repeat through your earphones, writing is suddenly the easiest thing to do (when 3 minutes ago you could almost swear it off—especially since it's what you do for a living). 

This is Mio. Say hi.

Before I drown both you and I into my bottomless pit of unwanted analogies, here's what I want to really say: music is everything, at least to me. It makes life bearable, for one, and it makes it easier to feel whatever it is you want to feel at any given moment for two, three, four, and everything that comes after.

In light thereof, I would like to say that I mention all these for context, because this post can't be any more ironic. As I write this, absolutely no song is being played. For some reason, and blasphemous to my normal way of doing things, I can't seem to write with even my comfort songs playing. My normally great-on-normal-days, work-inducing playlist is just annoying. It's ironic, too, because I'm supposed to be writing about two *uhh-mazing* bands, whose music I soooo love, but instead I'm talking nonsense about ironies, blasphemies, and silence and music... in this personal (read: vain) blog I'm not even paid to maintain.

I believe my intro stopped at some point up top so let's just say this is now the body. Thanks.

Sometimes, we become too dependent on the familiar spaces we've either designed or designated. It's surprisingly easy to choose sides in any given situation, despite your moral structures telling you to see all the nooks and crannies of the spectrum. We get so caught up in protecting and refining that side we've grown comfortable in, simultaneously flicking away even the most plausible of ideas coming from the polar opposite. It's virtually the same as supporting a strongman so hard you're willing to deny even the sweetest truths coming from the other party. //The events, characters, and firms depicted in that last line are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual firms, is purely coincidental. Charot.//

What all that ^ means in relation to the intended point of this writing, is that never in my life did I ever imagine choosing dull, boring silence over life-saving, inciting music. I just couldn't see it. Whenever people said, "I like quiet," I would say, "Me too," thinking they meant quiet as in according to definition, with at least a hint of music. I couldn't quite picture how one can truly thrive in total silence. It was only very recently that I realized there was a pattern to my few and far between moments of shush. I realized that some of my best works were produced then; that in those moments, I was just as happy.

Now, I can actually say I sometimes crave silence. It gives off a different kind of peace that you don't get from listening to your favorite songs. It clears up a space in your head for thoughts to actually mingle with each other, where music would just put them in a brawl (and vice versa). I can now enjoy the beauty of silence without the fear of revoking my music lover card, because I'm so close to appreciating the yins in the yangs and the yangs in the yins. Just like I used to hate ampalaya but now sometimes long for that bitterness on my tongue, and how I used to think I'll never enjoy shounen manga/anime but now love them.

Those last four paragraphs, I wrote while tipsy, so please

excuse the over-explaining and the babbling and the misplaced parallelisms.

We're almost at the end, swear.

❤️ Also, this is Kagome. She is perfect. ❤️

SO. Five things:

- My opinions on things can and will change whether I like it or not.

- The truth isn't limited to my side of the compass.

- Silence and music aren't any better than the other, in my newly updated opinion.

- It's okay to like things I didn't before.

- It's okay to like seemingly opposite things at once.

I should probably write once I've had some sleep. But I'm leaving this up because my vulnerability is another part of me that I'm starting to accept.

And I do not know how to end this. So goodbye.