Between Everything and Nothing

October 1st, 2011. 9:52 p.m.  Cool, rainy, quiet.  In other words, almost perfect.

This weather makes me want to smoke.  I don't know why.  Tobacco smoke makes me physically ill, and I loathe the smell of it.  Yet here I am envisioning myself with ciggie in hand, massaging my temples and blowing a thin stream of second-hand out through my nostrils.  That will not do.  Not tonight, not ever.  I shake my head a few times to make the feeling go away.  All at once, I am tired.

This house is quiet, much quieter than I can recall any other place in which I have lived.  The last place that approached the level of quiet here must have been my boyhood home; both houses have masonry walls.  It has been decades since I have lived at length inside the ones in which I grew up.  The neighborhoods are similar and they both possess their own peculiar quiet.  My current one seems to have a bit of an edge.  Or perhaps it is my imagination only.

This room I am coming to enjoy.  It is the largest bedroom I have ever called my own.  The room in which I slept in my old house was larger, but I rarely was alone in there.  Psychically, my current room seems expansive because it is just me.  Well, me, memories and anticipations.

Rain falling.  I turned off the air conditioner yesterday.  Tonight, I leave the fan off so I can soak up the imperfect silence.  I hear that rain through open windows, gentle hiss on the leaves and grass, backed up with a faint chorus of crickets.  The sound lulls me.  Soothing whispers borne down to earth on the breath of angels.  There is no straining to listen.  There is no need to work so hard.  It is enough to lay still, and listen.

The rain falls.  I lay back on my pillows with my eyes drooping shut from the lassitude of the day.  In doing so, the rain sound intensifies.  The reduction of one sense, sight, allows for the sharpening of another, hearing.  Laying here, slowly melting into my bed, I listen carefully, and relaxed.  Drops of water strike the earth, the window glass, the eroded edges of the wood fence in the side yard.  The feather force of the drops pings the gongs of my heart and soul.

Rain speaks, it whispers in unhurried consultation with the night.  I lean toward the sound.  Water makes holes in the breeze to tell me that between everything and nothing lies love.  I dream of walking straight and narrow between them, hands outstretched, and am filled with the warm embrace of knowledge, of knowing that this room in which I lay will not always seem so big.