5 minute read
ode to night
by SHREYA RAJHANS
Deep into darkness set in the night, a musing that sets my mind alight
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Iused to lie asleep, but now all I do is lie. Lie awake and unmoving in the calm of the night. Waiting. Always waiting for some reassurance that the dark space won’t swallow my soul whole like it did to my body. I can’t see myself in the deep of the night. But I feel I am here, perhaps unwillingly, perhaps fleetingly, but I am here. The space that flows around me connects my racing soul to my static body. It connects me to myself just as it connects me to my experience.
Loneliness is the child of my emptiness. I worry about the future, that one moment. The moment that will define my life, when I will find out whether my body will sink into the inviting earth or whether my soul will float up into a dark sky. And emptiness brings with it the realization of loss.
The loss of my dearest ones looms above my head like a rumbling thundercloud, ready to burst with the gravity of their deaths and separations. The guilt slowly simmers and bubbles throughout an especially stormy day, as the night prowls on the corners of my mind. Slowly it becomes too hard to avoid the humid and clammy feeling of my grief, and the sunset bodes a farewell to my sanity as I see my loved ones faces just within reach as the darkness creeps upon me.
In the night I wonder. How I know I am alive. It starts an unsettling process of why my body feels, and whether I will feel even when I am reduced to a spirit, an essence. My body is necessary to be a human, to feel love and pain, but my soul is what gives me life. In the night I wonder. What it means to float and die.
The silence is unnerving, it amplifies my thoughts. My head on a pillow, the day running through my mind, racing and racing. I can feel the wind blowing through the trees around me, as though I am surrounded by a chasm of air and leaves. The brown and lifeless leaves that crackle in the dark, and under my feet, like a fire lit in my mind that crackles with an eerie lull. I picture the fire, seeing my reflection in the flickering flames. I think of what I am, what I did, that day. Eating, drinking, studying, speaking. A mindless cycle of mediocrity. Round and round. Until I am vanquished. Until I am no more.
Suddenly I’m down a train of thought, not unfamiliar, but wholly uncomfortable. I think of disappearing. Poof. Just one day, being gone. Will I know when it happens, I wonder again. Will I know an existence after it happens, I dare to ask again. Again and Again. The thoughts are old but the night is new. A few hours of rest turn into a lifetime of questions revolving around the end. My end. The ones I loved, their end.
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Not just their memory, not just a wisp, but their whole essence. It escapes my fingers just so. I wonder if I can grasp it in this night. Suddenly the night seems to beckon closer, its howls and swoons speeding through the darkness, with the whispered promise of seeing those I lost, of being able to say a semblance of my regret at their loss. Because their time either came too soon or not soon enough. Of being able to convey that gnawing at my soul when their memory flickers and sputters in my idle mind. The overwhelming sense of loss tides through my body, the encompassing grief wracks the constitution of my soul, flooding, drowning, burying, until there is silence in the dark again. Until, a single word is crystalized in the air. Why?
Time seems to stand still on this night. On every night.
I look into myself trying to see but the darkness has enveloped me.
Space is a monster. It swallows whole and unapologetically. Eating, eating, until all has been devoured. Until all that’s left is the blankness that is born out of its womb. A monster that just takes and takes and takes.
And I am no different because I willingly collapse into the inconspicuous plain of night. That unassuming blankness that hides a churning loneliness underneath it.
The night is unavoidable, like these thoughts. They come from a place inside me that recognizes my physicality. My mortality creeps up like vines, covering every inch of me until all I can see and feel is myself. What it means to be alive, with a soul, and a body. I feel the space around me as a reminder of the connection I share with another person. The same night that swallows me bridges a delicate thread between me and someone else. I worry if my thoughts pull and strain that thread, hurting the person, making them wonder who’s on the other side of their space. On the other side of their night.
Some nights my worry comes to tears in the hope that the anticipation will end. The salty water is proof of my conscience. I screw my eyes shut and try to chase the sleep that mocks me. Angry and tired, at the incessant thoughts that refuse to leave my side. The windowpane creeks with laughter at my dilemma, the glass it holds together winks at the solution that escapes me. The solution to the emptiness around me that always is out of reach.
I try and try to leave my mind but the feeling there is gone. I am numb. The night conquers all.
It gives me a space to feel the thoughts I otherwise avoid. It gives me a chance to reassure myself that I haven’t forgotten my dearest. It allows me to promise my dearest that I’ll see them again in due time. ■
