THE DEAFENING SILENCE

So here I am.

The middle of the night- a fire slowly fading, a silver dollar moon in the sky illuminating the landscape, a cacophony of nightsounds breaking the stillness: frogs singing, coyotes howling, raccoons rustling in the brush, and a deafening silence from the one that matters.

This will make no sense to anyone other than me. The first time I experienced one of my "moments" was in grade school. I was 7 or 8, and i was in the gym, which also served as the lunch room. The school didn't serve lunch, only milk and beverages- all children were expected to bring their own lunches. I was sitting there, opening my industrial type lunch box, pulling out my thermos of soup, when all of a sudden everything became heightened. It was as if every sound, every voice, was aggregated and compiled and combined to produce a complete assault on my senses. And as I sat there, I began to isolate and identify thoughts and conversations for specific kids, even those who were far to far away to hear with my ears. I cast my eyes about and just by focusing on a person it seemed as if I could hear not only exactly what they were saying, but also what they were thinking. I know this makes no sense whatsoever, and I also know it makes me sound like a mental case. But I am not prone to whimsy, and these "moments" have happened often enough that I realized that they were real, and not just a product of an overactive imagination.

But at the time the experience was so powerful, and so disconcerting, that I essentially "shut down" for a couple of months. The whole episode was compounded by the fact that after this first time these "moments" seemed to happen on a regular basis, and they so overwhelmed me that I would become immobilized for a period of time. These episodes diminished in frequency as I grew older, and when they did happen I grew more accomplished in hiding them from others. I also found that on occasion whatever it was I was experiencing would later prove to be completely wrong, so I decided that whatever was going on was just a bizarre oddity of psychology.

I don't know what this has to do with anything right now honestly. But it is my 48th birthday, I am sitting beside a dying fire with my laptop and a small battery operated lantern, and I am trying to make sense of a remarkable number of "moments" that have happened recently. And these "moments" have been combined with enough actual "real" world events so that  I am left with a deep melancholy as I listen to the fire crackle and watch the moonlit shadows play across the landscape.

Another year has passed. I won't elaborate, but I have been given a glimpse of what is in store for me. I have found someone and something I desperately want, and I have tried every way I know how to drop hints of what I expect and need and want to hear from her, and the silence back is deafening. This is not her fault, I can't even define what I am experiencing, and I am woefully inadequate in trying to convey my feelings. But words, deeds, and actions matter, and I have to come to grips with my disappointments because they are more a reflection on me than anyone else.

The fire fades, the moon works its way across the horizon, and I can almost picturing myself 1000 years ago, beside a similar fire, aching for something undefinable, imagining things that might be.

And while the night is alive with sounds that define the darkest hours, the words and thoughts that I long to hear remain unspoken, and I can only watch the embers die slowly.

Sometimes the silence truly is deafening.