Silence Ivy Anthropology
The Race of Silence: Where the Damaged Still Know How to Bleed
On the ground lay the shattered dreams of others: a child’s hand, blood and soot down to the wrist, sifts unrecognizably through the rubble of her school. In lieu of a memory, there is only the torn page stained by the ink bleeding like bleeding wounds. Not far a way, a mother presses cold steel to her wrist, filling vials full of her own lifeblood for the medicine that saves her daughter. On the edge of the shore, a pale body floats face down, a refugee swallowed by apathetic waves, while the world scrolls by, likes and shares turning compassion into something convenient. This is the edifice of humanity : cruelty perfected by policy, apathy in screens, greed manifesting in profit over human lives.
Hear the silence of broken things: an orphan’s whispered lullaby to an empty cradle; the breath of a soldier abandoned by friends and enemies; the assurances of “Next time you’ll be safe,” uttered by a guard who was lying. Our reflections have become echoes of our failures—hollow, endless, and unyielding. Streets run red and we still trade empathy for entertainment and humanity for headlines.
The Last Horse
In the middle of all this destruction, there is one silent figure left. His voice was taken from him on the day the bombs fell; his tongue, casualty of orders he would never comprehend. A girl no older than twelve stitches torn silks for the rich. Her fingers are tow from elegance and dexterity, and famished—each of her seams reminds her of her empty belly. A man brushes on the ashes of a courthouse; he is collecting dust from judgments that are not going to be made. They are the “horses” of our world; they are over ridden, betrayed when their strength abandons them, silenced when their cries reach the heavens.
And yet in their silence, they are a learned mercy. The boy shares the stale bread with a one-legged veteran he cannot bring back. The girl hides a few wrinkles of cloth in her ripped pocket—a soft petal of color for the boy next door who will die. The sweeper collects broken glass and broken metal, and makes crude blades in order to protect those who are without power in his alley. These silent soldiers remember what we have destroyed; to be human is to give, even when you have nothing left to give.
The Crack in the Mirror
If we are cruel, do we lose our humanity?
If we bleed compassion, do we bleed the evidence we remain human?
Consider the guard who is adjacent to a locked door and hears the soft, whimpering through the door; the tension between fidelity and compassion makes his hand tremble before he unlocks the door for a moment of disobedience and perhaps the saving of a life. The scientist with a lab humming with the promise of destruction, but who disassembles their prototypes rather than weaponizes them. The child with cupped hands catches water for a dying sparrow under a burnt branch. All exceptions to our one dimensional apathy- all entry points where the growing light finds a way despite all of this.
In these cracks, we see possibility. The mathematics of cruelty and indifference do not net inevitability- the equation is grounded in our decisions. Each gentle hand extended in spite of fear, complexity, and power redefines the calculus in the imposition of the power presumed as unchanged. Each whisper of “we remember” exposes cracks in the armor made from the debris of wars and greed.
Rise from Ash
Finally, the race is over. The last horse pedals—once a boy of few words, now lifts his head and speaks, his voice thin but steady:
“We are not dumb beasts bred for profit, dumb ghosts lost through silence—we are the pulse beneath the injuries, the ache that won’t go away. They told us to run, we are standing. They told us to walk, we are walking, trembling hand in hand, toward each other.”
Silence envelops the broken land. In that silence, we can sense something shifting: the soft sounds of breathing together, and the barely audible clank of tools beating out a new kind of hope. We know how to bleed—and we remember how to heal.
We are no longer horses racing to be broken. We are witnesses to our own salvation: our ability to care, to sacrifice, to rise—from ash, from silence, from hopelessness—into the ridiculously fragile and indestructible light of our shared humanity.
By: Akshat Parmar
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