The silence is hard to survive.   It claws at my brain, scratching and picking with incessant demands. I want to hear something, anything to take my mind from this solitary path.

The bedroom window, dimmed to only a glimmer of fading light, snags my attention.  Wind rustles, the implication of life, beyond those dirty glass panes.

Over and over the evening breeze rushes the transport of decrepit leaves.  The squeak of an odd tree branch rubs boldly against the unrelenting stance of an outside telephone poll.  Their whispers echo of a freeing promise from this silence.

A lone bird offers a warbled farewell to the day.  While the onset of evening is met through the rhythmic buzz in a locust cadence.  Freed from the musky earth, life hums and spirals into the gathering darkness.

There is no silence in the deep of night.   But here, trapped in my brain,  only the damning drum of emptiness resounds .   Without end, without ease, there is no release from this frighteningly quiet prison.

Instead I watch as shadows curtsey and bow in a brilliant kaleidoscope dance across the night screen.  Life is there, outside my window.  But here--with me--only silence remains.