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To Let Go of the Hand of The Dying

On the Difference Between Quiet and Silence

Nights come more easily now. See how in the last hour before darkness, the withering sun outlines everything in gold, an aureate amber dripping from leaves and trash as though they are both sharing in the same dream. A crow calls incessantly from the tree outside my California bedroom, its voice somehow both high pitched and gravelly. I find myself thinking about what it wants, maybe nothing more than the same thing we all want: to be heard.

This moment is quiet. Not in the sense of lack of sound, because there are many sounds: the whistle of mockingbirds and finches, the rustling of leaves in the autumn wind. A car zooms up the hill celebrating its power, hip hop plays in a back yard far away. There are sounds, but for me there is not noise. Noise is what I have experienced all day, a day I spent aimlessly in the vortex of social media, scrolling and scrolling, and scrolling. Letting the voices of thousands of strangers into my head. I am scrolling and looking for something, though I don’t know exactly what. I see things that make me laugh, things that make me afraid. I see things that flabbergast me and make me smack my teeth quietly, shaking my head the way my mother and her sisters used to do when confronted with bad news about which they could do nothing but rue the day. A crying shame, they would call it. It don’t make no damn sense.