In Silence

(Illustration by John Hersey)

(Illustration by John Hersey)

I couldn’t sleep well last night, staying up until two, listening to music and writing, floating through the dating app apps for someone to talk to.

I stepped outside to get away from the stale air of my room and my phone. No lights were on save for the light creeping through the window of my door. I stood there in the cold. There was no wind. There was no music or talk coming from any of the neighbors houses. There seemed to be nothing but the sound of old flowers falling to the soil. The air was filled with a stillness so complete it seemed that, at that hour, the world was at a pause. The owls were either gone, or unwilling to talk. I could hear every wrinkle turn in my jacket as I sighed or took in a breath, breaking through the stillness, but only for a moment, never truly disturbing it.

The light from the stars was full, yet there seemed to be no shadows. Everything was enveloped in the shade of the sun. The plants in front of me becoming odd shapes, their edges fading into darker shades behind and in front of them.

The silence and the darkness were so deep, so comparable to each other, that nothing could break through. I sighed again. It quickly disappeared into that silence and the total shadow it was tucked within.

That day was the day that my anxieties of boredom grew, solitude no longer a word but a temporary reality so evident I couldn’t help but embrace it. I stood there, listening to the nothingness that surrounded me. I looked up to the tall bush of camellias, some flowers old and worn, drooping as though waiting their turn to meet the soil beneath them. Other buds appearing ready to wake to the loud sunlight and to be taken over to some joy.

I breathed out my mouth quickly. Nothing. No cars in the distance, no generator pounding, no light breaking onto the trees in the front yard, no sound of the air passing out my body. Nothing. The stars out above, begging to be seen. To be really seen, without a filter or perspective, just as they are, fragments of light of distant pasts. Though, I guess that’s a perspective.

Perhaps we should all take more time away from our phones, our people, and take in moments of solitude. Perhaps by embracing solitude, we will find more reason to hope. We are always surrounded by these loud noises that pervade our usual existence that the world becomes shocking without them. In this current state of abnormality, the silence, the darkness, they protrude out like anvils onto us, reminding us how much we disturb the silent nocturnal reality that so many animals need for life.

I was engulfed in the silence. I was filled up by the darkness and made whole again. Made to believe in hope. And not in hope as a word and not really as a feeling. The sense of nothing was so complete, so undisturbed that I was woken again to my body, my breath, the movements of my feet to hold myself upright. I guess it woke me up to my own life. Better than saying we are in this together or any lighthearted, desperate, and fearful phrase for unity. I felt the union. A hard won hope, from not looking at a screen and trying to find the good in reason, but in being. I found reason to be hopeful, not in words, but in my body. Life a stark contrast to the sleeping of my town and the bare concrete.