TheBanyanTree: A Quiet Night Coming

[B Drummond]

I see a quiet night coming.  

Dusk arrives in less than half an hour and I feel a restlessness 
in my soul.  Soon it will be dark.  Soon I will feel the full 
hollowness of my empty heart.
  
The wife and kids are away.  I am batching it tonight.  We are 
separated by hundreds of miles, several states, and what feels 
in my heart like the distance to the far edge of the universe.

I miss their company and I sit here in desperate need of a diversion, 
something to keep my mind from thoughts profound.  The superficial, 
the shallow, and the trivial are all I can handle in these times.

But I know the truth.  Soon I will give up the fight, lay my head 
solitary against a pillow and I will not be able to stop them for they 
will visit me in the night.  Perhaps they will startle me awake in my 
muffled screams. Terror in the depths that I can't quite force from 
my mouth, terror hung in my throat, just below the vocal cords, at 
best rendered as guttural pleas for mercy. Perhaps they will let me 
rest.  But like life itself, I can never predict them.  

When the grogginess passes, when my head clears, when I realize 
where I am, what I am doing, strangely, I will long to know what they 
were, why I feared them, why they come when I feel that full 
hollowness of heart, when I feel all alone against the toss of the coin 
and the clamor of a quiet night.



  bd
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