Hello darkness, my old friend.
That's how I greeted most mornings during the Covid summer of 2020. It's the opening line of a song everybody but me knew, "The Sound of Silence," until a TV show educated me. It's been reverberating in my brain ever since I heard it on Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist in April. It haunts the silence of my quarantined life.
Working from home full time while living alone was never a lifestyle I wanted. It's the main reason I never seriously pursued a full-time freelance career because that much aloneness, even for someone who is 92% introverted, is not a healthy way to live. But as a society we've decided that the only definition of health that matters right now is being virus free.
So my life entered a silence I've never experienced before. The pandemic took away most of my reasons to leave the house and all the variety that comes with each excursion. Live TV entertainment went away for a while, unless you were desperate enough to watch corn hole or golf. (I was not.)
Something had to fill that void, and the void was too big for me to fill with hobbies, exercise, and family visits.
"Fools," said I, "You do now know
Silence, like a cancer grows"
I had a job, my health, my family, and my faith. A solid foundation for a good, happy life. But the quarantine lifestyle hampered my ability to focus, to be content, to find any silver lining. I wanted to create and learn during my quasi house arrest, but that meant facing the nihilistic boredom first. Something I did not have the energy for.
People writing songs that voices never share
Life was about surviving now, not living.
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
These are not silent times we live in; we've been shouting at each other for months about masks and Black Lives Matter and the 2020 election.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
The silence I'm talking about isn't a simple lack of noise. It's merely the result of exchanging a complete life for a lonely, unfulfilling one. Our weapon against COVID-19 demands that we do something humanity is not evolved to do: stay away from each other. For months. And months and months.
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
This kind of silence consumes you, defines your very existence.
Until one day you start to believe what you've been telling yourself all along: this, too, will end. Nothing on this earth lasts forever. Not happiness, not suffering.
The song that narrated your life will become a memento of your past. Your favorite season will begin and you'll start talking about the hard times in the past tense. You'll finish the blog post you've been writing for weeks.
You'll find that you can, in fact, manage the silence, even if your situation is unchangeable. And, like this flower in my home-office window, reach through the shadows for the life-giving light.
