Walking the Wall

I’ve always equated silence with darkness, and I’ve always had a double sided relationship with silence and darkness. On one hand, growing up with six siblings, when nighttime came and silence settled over the house, it was an audible, welcome quiet that was something to be hoarded. At the same time, due to a vivid imagination, the silence of darkness often held fears that lurked just out of sight, and many hours were spent identifying the noises that crept up, setting aside those that were safe noises and turning the rest into goblins and ghosts.

I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can remember, counting up as high as I could count, spelling out stories and conversations letter by letter in sign language, rewriting books I’ve read in my mind, or simply telling myself new ones. There are times that I think that it is a curse, and extraordinarily frustrating one at times, but for the most part I love sitting up in the night reading, or writing and soaking up the stillness. I love the feel of slipping into bed when the whole house is asleep and laying awake cushioned all around by the weight of the dark silence. If I’m really tired, and I’ve just taken a very hot bath at 2:30am, I can slip into bed and not feel the bed at all in a few moments and feel like I am hanging in stasis or floating in a liquid black pool.

I associate mermaids with darkness as well, sliding through the dark waters or curled together in some deep cave rocked by the motions of the sea. I remember going to the lake in my grandmother’s town at night with my cousins and sitting on the rocks that lined the shoreline listening to the slap of the water on the sides of the weathered stones–it was in the spaces of silence between the hard sloshing that held the most magic of possibilities.

My uncle built one of those storage sheds you put out in the backyard for lawn-mowers and tools high up in between two trees way back at the edge of their property just inside the edge of the woods for my cousins. I remember many nights high in the trees sleeping up in the tiny loft and being lulled by the whispers and rustles of the trees that sang a mesmerizing harmony with the silences between. It felt like we were in a boat on a sea of trees with the soft scrabbling of leaves rather than the lapping of waves.

There is a healing to be found in dark silences–a time of regeneration, recharging our energies for the loud busy-ness of daylight.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

~Henry David Thoreau