A Sudden Silence

The Saturday sluggishly slides into existence, like an extension of last night, the straightforward and almost dull appendix to a fascinating but incomprehensible story. I look out to the quiet hillsides, balancing heavy clouds on their heads, and even now the drops fall, splattering on the deck in tiny puddles which connect and flood together the wood. Or at least they would flood the green algae-covered wood of the deck, if only the clouds could make up their minds to dissipate and collapse into nothingness. I see patches of blue fighting to come back, and I wonder why the sky has differing shades everyday. There is probably some scientific reason that I might hear someday and then promptly forget because I like the not knowing the reason. It is powder blue one day, distant and unreachable, and deep sapphire the next, a gemstoned ceiling. That is all.

A sudden silence, like a Saturday in the middle of nowhere, gives way to confused contemplation. I hold onto myself, knowing full well the risk of losing everything in the midst of such rampant quietness. On edge, I feel the insatiable desire to have it all at once: the glorified past, the touch of today, the anticipated future all in the same moment. Sitting by my piano, I can look out to the sea, like a smudge in the distance. I remember having been there, by the ocean, and I can see it now, and I will return to the ever-breaking, ever-renewed suffering soul of the sea.

I have been rereading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Today I came to the part near the end when Lily Briscoe is remembering the summer long ago before Mrs. Ramsay died. She reminisces about one time when they were down by the shore, and Mrs. Ramsay was writing letters tinged with sea salt. Mrs. Ramsay looked up and saw something floating out on the water. But she was near-sighted and couldn't tell what it was.

"Is it a boat? Is it a cask?" Mrs. Ramsay said. And she began hunting round for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent, looking out to sea. 

It is the not seeing and then the seeing and then the being silent.  Looking out without my glasses, all I see is blurred shapes, splotches of color colliding together in chaos. I then look through the clear glass and suddenly I see the lines and the boundaries, the glorious details I had missed. It is for this reason that I am glad I have both perspectives. Without imperfection, I would fail to appreciate the beauty. Without the moments of blindness, I would run over the moments of clarity with reckless disregard.