There's a kind of bird: common and brown in appearance and name. If' it's disturbed from its night roost, it won't or can't re-settle until dawn.
I hear them sometimes; single bird songs at unlikely hours ~ three a.m. Or two. Can't decide if it's a comforting or eerie sound. Both. Very alone.
I think birds aren't meant to be alone. Its voice in those off hours is beautiful but very sad. Very ... wrong.
A bird didn't wake me. It's my own voice from far away. Crying, I think. Dramatic? Except I tell no one so the drama is lost on me. Lost here, at the heart of the sound made by a heart's absence. It isn't 'white noise.' I don't believe noise can be white. An occupied silence ... which can be lovely; shared between loved ones or angels. But it is not always lovely.
Someone's been here during the night. Someone's entered here where there are many books and things that have been where I put them for so long that the shelves have paled around their persistent spines. Walls have darkened around frames, leaving vivid memory bordered by permanent shadow. Fabric and cut glass and letters piled in ways familiar only to me; ordered in a gentle precision I'd know even through sleep or distraction.
Someone has come while I slept, put their lips beside my ear and with whispers, coaxed my dreams into nightmares that will weave me through their own dark skins; film and inform my eyes. Bad. Dreams. I won't be able to recall them but they will re-configure my world. Try to wipe them away only to rub them in more deeply. I will lose contrast and comparison. Try to sweat them out, walk them off, replace their death knell with hush. I will be so tired. Dreams like these. they feed on your sleep.
Someone in one arm sweep ~ See?!! Knocked bare walls and shelves. A bonfire pile at the room's center, high with images and pages torn at curious angles; confused and confusing the flame.
Return each item to its shadow? Use clear tape to put my crippled words back together?
These are not my things anymore. I don't recognize their surfaces or shapes. Those are not my words with such unfamiliar scents and tones. Nothing fits. Nothing.
Somewhere though, my safety is still safe without me. Undisturbed. It's I that has been moved to a war-like facsimile where I wake splintered through arrhythmic's between my own even heartbeat.
I need to hear my name. I need someone who knows me to say my name. I think to call out but my throat fills with that far away voice ~ a swallow trapped in a dark barn; song tangled through the rafters where Dawn arrives only in rumors that echoes don't confirm.
"God bless the rape victim. Stabbed soul who's seen a face up too close to ever forget it, felt the groping hands, the heat of the breath, known no power and no hope ... who cannot go to the bathroom or welcome a lover there again without remembering. Once my body was not mine. Someone wrong took it and never gave it back. God bless you. I know what you know." Excerpt from Jonathon Carroll's "From the Teeth of Angel's"
