Coming Home

The Sounds of Silence

  On a quiet night, on a quiet street, an old man sat in his quiet house, somberly reflecting on the silence generated from the words he had left unsaid. The man, not wanting to disturb the tranquility of the moonlight shining in through the windows, the ethereal chirping of the night's crickets, began to take stock of the things in the room. The leather-backed armchair that he sat in, (the only piece of furniture in what had recently become a nearly vacant room), was worn down by years of use and conformed to his body perfectly. Its well-earned depressions and cracks felt to him like the warm embrace of an old friend on this particularly still evening.

At his feet lay his old dog. The swatch of warmed stone in front of the old brick fireplace (glowing with a crackling fire as it was) was as a welcomed bed for the tired dog. In his early years, the man would have thought it impossible that this formerly spastic pup would ever grow into the tired old relic he was today. In the wake of the night's omnipotent stillness though, such memories made the man feel foolish.

"When the young are young, they have no concept of what aging will bring," he thought to himself. "They have an understanding that things will change, and the vibrant lights that comprise their existence will dim, but it is a cursory understanding at best."

Turning his gaze from his sleeping companion, the man let his eyes come to rest on the door on the side of the room. It struck him as odd that something so banal could, on this particular evening, carry with it so much feeling. How many times had he passed in and out of its threshold? How many times had he twisted that now-tarnished handle to bring that pale door to life? Those moments had been so commonplace back then, but tonight, during the hours in which only the tormented seek to clear their tattered minds, that door meant everything.

As he stared at the door, realizing not for the first time that its opening and closing would be forever marred by the events of the day prior, the old man found himself longing for the vibrancy of moments he had never experienced, yet felt were owed and lost to him in the same breath.