this is what made you at times jangle

He loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping. He could do nothing about it, though. Not yet. He could carry all of it in his head. Not talk about it.

—Patrick White, The Vivisector

it’s an odd thing. at first i ran from the silences. i would feel them stretching out, pooling too fast along the corners of the floor, slanting toward me as i jogged down the short hallway that connects my room to the kitchen. would find them waiting for me in the bathroom, curled up and clustered in massive numbers behind the shower curtain. they dropped from my own ceiling in the middle of the night and woke me from my dreams. in the day, i would turn on the TV to banish them, any movie, any show and if not, i’d play music. always i would bounce like a moth back and forth from one lamp of electric energy to another, always feeling the burning fringe of a void was close behind….

something happened. or began to happen…or ceased to happen. i’m not sure about this part. the imagining this part is dull. so is pronouncing myself HERE and no longer THERE. i’m thinking i really have no idea and this may be nothing more than a brief pause anyway. but somehow i have come to welcome them. i’m trying to remember if it was bit by bit…but i’m just blank on that part. all i know is one day i realized i was sitting, and not feeling lost…but just sitting. and exploring my experience. and not tensed under a massive weight of hissing silence and ready to bolt…but like some sort of oaken and well-oiled drum made to resonate with the smallest and most lavender of vibrations—

i wake early to find these silences in the livingroom and i sit down, there. joining them in the darkness where light has only dusted the edge of this or that where you can immerse yourself in a lake of silence. not…waiting for sun, not wishing anything away. just setting yourself down and being there. not intruding upon the night or feeling intruded upon by it, simply being another living part of her. as real and intent and aware and still as a lake that mirrors the stars back to the sky.

i find these silences resting against me in bed. i enjoy them now and don’t find myself springing to my feet and to the computer so often, while i’m still squinting. i don’t force each moment to clip against another moment, creating some frantic ladder from one activity to another. sometimes i sit and let them drift in the sky of time…coming apart or healing up together as they will. some early early mornings i open my eyes, lie there and look up at the predawning sky, violet or orange it always looks sweet and a bit unreal at first maybe i’m even looking through the rainbow film of a dream, sometimes i turn my head into the warmth of my own hair and fall back asleep.

i think today is thanksgiving. i saw a printout for specials in the bakery. apple crumb pie and so on. delicious. very expensive. i wonder what i’ll eat later. it won’t be apple crumb pie! maybe it will be steak and potatoes at the bar. hmmm. or maybe i’ll just fry up some quesadillas. we’ll see.