And then there it was, another Eve, which is to say a night before something really important. And we had waited and suffered and toiled and literally bled, and sacrificed and Hoped. All these things we had done before and Nothing had come of it.
Nothing.
Which is worse than ‘something bad.’ ‘Nothing’ is the Universe ignoring you like a father too busy with work. ‘Nothing’ is the Universe ignoring you like some girl absentmindedly tossing aside your profoundest Valentine letter unread.‘Nothing’ is the Universe ignoring you like a rescue ship passing a marooned sailor.
So we had learned to keep Hope in the basement and lie to the neighbors about her whereabouts and feed her scraps in secret, to keep her alive, but hidden, lest the World catch wind of it and come one night in a black van and kick in our doors and steal her away entirely and mock us on the way out for thinking we could get away with such nonsense.
But here we were. A real Eve again. You don’t get too many Eves in a Life. A lot of nights, but not so many Eves. Stars aligning or doors opening or what have you. You got a precious few even if you were watching for them.
We knew it was an Eve because Hope was clawing at the basement door with ragged jagged fingers while the slick shellacked black Jackboots of Reality stood in the kitchen asking, “What’s that noise?” and you felt like your chest would explode in bursting ribcage relief just from the waiting and you wanted to throw open the basement door and unleash that ravenous hellhound Hope upon them and watch her fulfill herself and devour all those smirking told-you-so bastards while she was at it and taste the bloody iron-salt on your tongue of the vindication that would swell in you and around you like a banshee screaming, or a geyser, or the endless pounding of the sea…
But not yet. because it’s still the Eve… and if the letter didn’t arrive, and if the call never came, if the ‘thing’ didn’t happen, you could still stare back, apathetic (you would have to). Stare back as if nothing had happened, into the icy-blue told-you-so eyes of the World that was keeping you down, twisting its heels on the wounds you’d be pretending weren’t tearing through your soul. You’d look into those eyes and clear your throat and you’d say, “What noise? I don’t hear a thing.”
And they would see right through you to your can-crushed dream, and smile wryly, knowingly, as they departed, because the real world delights in Deaths. Deaths are the backside of Darwin’s coin. Survival of the fittest. Death of the weakest. Deaths are the rungs on a ladder of another’s triumphant survival. And you had dared, again, that this Hope, that this one wasn’t weak, that something would come of it,
but if it didn’t you wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing it. And you’d stand there like the pharaoh in some fairy tale as the walls of ‘Nothing’ came flooding back to drown your finest chariots. But that hadn’t happened yet either, had it. No, no, no. It hadn’t. So this was what was worse than ‘something bad’ and worse than ‘nothing.’ ‘Waiting.’
Waiting on the Eve was worse than either. The feeling of absolute uncertainty, the broken-fingernailed scratching of starving Hope, the not-knowing-’nothing’ of waiting. That, it, this, fills all the Eternity of Silence that stretches on and on and on between ‘Now’ and the imminent, arriving, endlessly far-away ‘Then’ of tomorrow… between you and I
Between us and the ‘thing.’
Between “Yes we have, your Honor. We find the defendant- “
and the verdict of the morning after.
