When darkness falls
Gianoula Burns
The light went out and darkness fell on my face - it was then the shadows of the past started to whirl before me menacingly, enticingly, reminding me of misdemeanours, black thoughts that never really went away but lurk in the corners, in hidden passages in my mind. Is this loneliness? That vast empty void that descends when all is quiet, when everyone has left and then there is only yourself that you can confront, that will confront your shocked stunned silence. This is the space between the past and future, that grey part that is still to form or forge a path to somewhere else we cannot see, are hesitating to enter. The door lies open, it’s been open for a while, this other world, space, time, person we become. I hear the echoes of my godmother as she begs me to not forget her, and I know now what she meant, to be forgotten is like never having been loved.
I dream of this and that, strange people populate stories within my head, at other times it is the more familiar and always visited by the dead, who seem so much alive as they talk to me in scenes created by them. Father comes and sits by the bed, softly spoken he soothes my pain, “I know what that is like, do you remember when I also felt that when you left?” I weep but cannot feel his caress just a cool breath that whispers something I cannot now hear, it wafts unheard into my blocked ear. Mother says that my dead aunt can now join him whom she really loved, spite moistens her tongue jealous that she did not die before him, something us her children do regret, not to have had the conversation we should have had with him, the heart to heart which we will never get.
Night stirs emotions rigorously, a broth of loss and fear and love, confusing real with visions seen in dreams, what is real is blurred when daylight wakes us and we forget. I struggle to retain the thread, the narrative that deep within me lies. How strange that it is only in sleep that what I cannot see in life is revealed only to wake and for it to disappear again like a puff of smoke that leaves no trace. There is the space where words, image and thought meet, like the board upon which a game is played, each piece played by those who no longer live but speak.
There has always been a time before, a time before this time here, a time when we began alone, or were with too many people to even think, a time when we did not think, just shaped by hands that moulded the us that we became then let us go spinning off into a world that we hoped would be benevolent or at best benign but that was not to be for we are but mankind. Strange to coin a word which is meaningless when applied, I mouth it and it feels unkind. Father now approaches and once again sits at my table very much alive, and more talkative than I remember. I feel his presence make haste with the little time he will embrace for there is much time lost when alive that only in the afterlife can make amends. It is a curse that in our lives when breath and body and mind in tact we cannot say that which we should say, or do what should be done and then to dwell in the grey between life and death we seek out the ones we loved or is it the loved ones that seek the dead?
It is in the darkness, on the night that words spring into life, day makes you lazily while away the time, precious time that should be spent in discovery of voices unheard or in neglect. Night has fallen but I lie awake hesitant to close my eyes and travel to that world that seeks my attention my address. I hear the voices of the young, the babes I held oh so briefly in my arms and know and wish that they had stayed, just a little longer, till I was prepared but time does not sit still it hurries on to distant views and I must contend with the self that is the one that’s here, alone and broken and full of fear.
Time passes and I see my aunts, my mother age, their voices now sound like my grandmother’s, a voice I recall from long ago, mostly on the telephone, deserted, abandoned in their ancestral home thousands of miles away from the line they desperately hold. They hear us grow each year on a distant call from overseas, imagining what we may have been knowing they will never see their descendants from year to year. They were long buried, in a grave somewhere upon the hills of a forsaken village that tourists now peer at as the bus swooshes past pointing out the old authentic folk like rare animals still native to the land that supports so few and becomes obliterated over the years. Black shiny vans now take the paying guest to remote beaches and to famous ship wrecks, or turtle nests that should be left alone but in time are dwindling as habitat declines.
But I digress, the shadows take shape one by one, take form, spring to life and leap before us like flames rooted in our mind but eager to flee from sight. Touch them and they burn their mark upon our skin to remind us where we have been but the scar can be interpreted in ways unintended. “He touched many lives.” She said in her eulogy of the man that hid behind her all her life. We all touch so many, without thinking, without intention, and I wander back to then when a friend berated me for leaving, or another one for misleading, or when he said, “I joined the army because of you.” I pondered what he meant and regret I did not give him more than just a thought of what a muse could be.
The shadows have now settled, taken seats around my story, waiver, hover, pause, and I don’t feel the fear no more, just their presence like a comfort that neither child nor husband can give when darkness falls.
