Night Mercy

If you are awake in the permeable hours before dawn, the quiet is  thin, a membrane coating the bodies of sleeping creatures, both those  you have invited into your house and the tiny, many-legged ones who live  underneath it, nestled in the walls, tucked into the cracks in the  siding.

Anything could rip this silence into shreds.  Your neighbour’s car alarm, those kids who race down Hastings Street in  the middle of the night in cars you wonder who paid for, the feral cat  who sits in your garden, yowling at your open bedroom window. Once it  was the lady who lives downstairs, who stood on her patio in the summer,  shouting that you were trying to ruin her, that you had sent malevolent  spirits into her apartment. The certainty in her voice was so tangible  that you searched your memory for the moment when you must have opened  the vent in the floor and pushed the ghosts through the ducts, where  they tumbled and rolled until they fell out of her ceiling,  precipitating a haunting so poisonous that it drove her into the hot  nighttime air, screaming until the police arrived. But then, she grew  tired, and the quiet snaked up your body again, a return so fast and  definitive, her hoarse voice then seemed like the kind of dream you  remember only in muted flashes as you drink your first coffee, barely  sentient.

You have come to treasure these hours of dark,  fragile silence. Before, they scared you, when you were new to the  perimenopausal sleep disruptions and hot flashes. Then, you lay there, a  puddle of sweat pooling in that cavity below your breasts, and felt  your head swirl in a spiral of anxiety. Why am I awake? How many Zoom  meetings will I have to attend tomorrow? Can I skip my morning workout?

Now though, you lie there, eyes on the lights that are  never turned off in the curtainless apartment across the alley, and you  can feel the quiet wrapping itself around you, cool against the heat of  your skin, soft and feather-light, a loyal friend when you could be the  most lonely, but you’re not, you’re not. The perfect silence is visiting  you, as it does every night, and you are grateful for its reliability,  the non-judgy way it simply exists, its lack of curiosity about  everything you do in the day, or everything you leave unfinished. There  is no one else who accepts you this fully, no one else who can hold you  and never ask for anything. A mercy, you think, to understand what these  two isolated hours every night can give you. The rest of the world is  boringly, expectedly asleep. This is yours alone.