The Midnight Hour
Bizarre strong winds howled all evening that day. The children had finally snuggled into bed. Exhausted and looking for some midnight company to satiate those gregarious hunger pangs, I waddled blindly into the kitchen. I happened to glance at the oven display at that fateful moment. The time on the digital display registered ‘midnight’ according to my rational brain, its diligent digits clicked from
00:59 to 00:00.
The witching hour.
(Long pause)
I froze. There was a very, very, long impregnated stillness.
The impregnated air draped heavily on its oppressive silence — it was, unmistakenly deafening. Like the feel of wet shower curtain on bare skin, it clung and cleaved to every fibre of my being.
The noise outside had immediately died down as if this was the moment of calm before the storm and, I was at its centre. The atmosphere was already laced with a tingling electric charge, lining the elephant in the room. It was as if time stopped.
My hand, that which had been slicing through mid-air with a piece of toast, rested mid-flight above the toaster, frozen. The charges were so heavy that the nerves at the back of my neck stood poised, rigid, ready for flight.
Suddenly, I felt afraid.
Fear had been imprisoning my body and my spirit. Unbeknownst to me, that moment marked the beginning of my journey to embosom fear and accept even the darkest sides of myself. Fear kept my mind closed; placed blinkers to keep my vision and dreams on the narrow path. Fear held my stiffened body in a straight line with crooked fingers. Fear, solidified my feelings so they stayed in digestible ice cubes instead of allowing them to melt, into running waters that flow and ebb with moon tide.
Fear held on… until… the break of dawn. Press play.
The dawn is breaking.
Nestling in the suburbs, smart lights
one after another would
stay on, awake, soon after the sunlight has
tethered rays deep into the rooms.
Thereafter,
light carried clarity, then…
Incurable pain.
“NO ONE EVER TOLD me that grief felt so like fear,” ~ C.S. Lewis
The winds are howling again, intermittently. Surfs’ up. So much loss after loss; that grief, let loose, has no end. This sense of endlessness curled into one single moment, sent my mind spiralling. In the midnight hour (that witchin’ feelin’), made me feel like I was holding onto…“Infinity in the palm of [my] hand”. Wave after wave of fear caress each trauma unleashed.
But choke, I did not.
Embracing the dark so that light can shine allows feelings to flow freely to gradually release the muscle memory of pain. What feels like an incurable, inconsolable, abyss of pain causes physical debilitation. Collective pain can be felt more poignantly in these pandemic times; or, have you forgotten — when bushfires threatened our forests and animals, let alone, the wars we wage upon ourselves?
00:01. Breathe.
