redwoods
In the grey twilight I stand beneath giants. From the ground I watch the light fade, feeling as small as I ever have. If there was something in the darkness, why hasn’t it found me yet? Why has my heart stopped beating? Why has my blood turned black?
My feet take me further, past those dark soldiers towering in the gloom. I walk in near darkness, trudge through mud, step over roots and underneath trunks that crashed to earth.
Maybe they made a sound, but not a soul heard their fall.
I wonder what it would be like to fall alone, to lay forgotten and rotting beneath a blanket of moss. I wonder if the other trees mourned their loss.
Around a bend, the forest widens, the sentinels stretching tall as grey shapes in the mist. I stop; my heart, my lungs, the slapping tread of my feet. In the pre-dark of a moonless night I listen to the absolute of the silence around me.
It twists through pattering droplets of water falling from branch to earth. It folds around age-old trunks waiting for a chance to find their final resting place upon the forest floor. It ducks beneath scattered ferns, dark as the moon on a stolen night.
It blankets the cut-flower silence of a man wanting more.
I open my mouth and it pours inside, searching for somewhere to escape. The world is too clustered for this quiet, there is not space for it to sleep. It fills me, breaking me in all of the right places. The lack of noise is a calamity of silence in a body that is a void. There was a time to watch from that stillness, a time to let it in, a time to watch alone from the darkness as the world drifts by.
I wait, my lungs tugging at the muscles in my chest, asking if they can gasp for help. I think about all of the times I’ve fallen to my knees, all of the times I’ve wrapped myself in this silence, shut myself beneath copper shadows.
Have I ever felt truly alive outside of golden moments between the dark of night and the first kiss of light upon the world, when the sun hits the mountains or your tired eyes inches from mine.
Some moments the quiet is too much.
I breathe out the silence, freeing it into the air again, freeing it for the world. The tumbling way of it settles amongst dew-drop ferns and sleeping trees, floats like leaves down into the muddied steams. Beneath deep shadows and faded colors, it fills in the gaps between what is and what isn’t, between moss covered branches, forgotten stones and broken memories.
When I’m all out of breath, I draw in a fresh lungful of redwood air and keep walking.