The quiet is a luxury I don’t often experience. Then times like this moment happen and I can truly treasure it. My ears adjust to the peaceful nothingness then they search for sound and for distraction because this is how they have been trained. It’s a loud quiet, something I’m not used to and will probably never be.
I’ve felt very alone lately. No doubt being inside my home 23 hours a day for the past month will do it to a person I suppose. There has also been a bunch of life’s bullet spray aimed in my general direction and getting hit doesn’t help matters either. Matters I can’t discuss or won’t more so, just personal battles amongst family wide health concerns. Heavy issues. Life and death level crap.
But I’ve got my quiet, at least during the day when the girls are at school. And do I want it? I guess it’s a reminder of the solitude I live in more than anything. It’s an echo that nobody is here, or there. It does hold appeal, don’t get me wrong. I love my girls to the end but endless chatter and mismanaged mini-spats creates headaches.
I will take their noise over silence and that’s my final answer. I don’t live in a daily fear of losing one of them or anything but I know as fast as the past 17 years went, the next 17 will go faster. And in 5, maybe 10 years these girls might be in some group home or be sharing their own apartment. And as much as I want that, I don’t want it twice as much. I’m all teary eyed just barely thinking about it.
And what then? Say in eight years from now, around their twenty fifth birthday, they are ready to be on their own, what a conflict that will be! But alot can change in eight years as we all know. I could be remarried and focused on her. My writing might have taken off and I will be travelling all the time. Where I am and who I am now has little to no bearing on where I’ll be then.
So when I retreat to write or walk the house in the daylight hours, like so much of my life, there is conflict in the quiet. It’s welcome but it screams at me the same. If nothing else it is when I create the most and it is necessary in all of its loud glory. It embraces me in a dark room at night and these are the times I need it the most so it’s not all bad to be quiet. Maybe it will grow on me one day.
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