I’ve noticed, since moving into my new home, that I rarely sit with the silences. There is always sound here, music, radio, tv, youtube clips, sometimes more than one running at once because when my brain is burning it helps to divide my attention between many things, the only way I can find some peace is the still centre of a complex whirling dance. I noticed I have been filling the silences, living around the empty spaces in my home and I have started to watch them in my life, like shadows I can see out of the corner of my eyes. They are very powerful things these silences, not empty and hollow and desolate, but breathing and alive. Here in the night where night after night I am awake and writing to myself, I feel the silence at my back and the shadows under my nails.

Some nights, when I feel strong, I sit in it. I quiet all the sounds and noise in my head and I listen to my heart beating in my ears, and I feel the shock that this is my life – that after all the plans and dreams and fears, this is the life I am leading. Strange and sad and beautiful, deeply loved, and built from so much loss. So many things I have so deeply feared have not come to pass, I have not aged to a dry husk, an empty adult, a Brian Aldiss adult; the corpse of a child. So many years that fear caught in my throat. I have not foundered on pain. Terrible things have happened and I have survived. It turns out I am strong, exactly as strong as I have needed to be, not one bit more or less, scales that balance perfectly. There is pain here, but not death, not nihilism, not hatred. Nightmares that evaporate in the dawn. And also, that so many things I have so deeply feared have already happened, that I walk with scars, my dreams that will never be sweet nothings, my hands that tremble in the dark.

I’m a little afraid of the dark, of the silence in my house. I’m wise to be, I’ve learned a lot since I was young. I’ve learned not to ask the big questions with such urgency that you tear open upon them. No bleeding out on the bathroom floor. I’ve learned that some truths kill to hold. You have to forget them for a little while, then fall over them in the dark again, discover them anew, remember what hurt again. Day and night, dark and light, memory and loss.

I’m also, perversely, a little relieved. All that time spent in the sun has not sapped the night of its power. The glorious orchestra of sound is still living in the presence of a silence that speaks into my bones. I hear the in-breath before speech and I close my ears. But I’m glad to know it’s there, a voice that speaks below the threshold of hearing, a strength that is not made of light, or day, or sweetness, but is fierce with the unspeakable truths and the hope you find when you walk into the heart of your nightmare and are not consumed by it. Still wings from these shoulders, though you cannot see them, still dreams in a dark heart. Still drinking deeply from that cup, however bitter. I still feel Narnia on the wind, in the night, the song of drains and the sadness of the rain, the empty sky over the sea, where I wait at the edge of my world and remember that all  my life is only this breath and the next, lightning in my brain, blood under skin and memories like shadows.

I remember again that I used to live for more than the day, and I find the night waiting for me, just waiting for me to walk in it, to remember it, to return to it, to find nerves in my skin again and the alien moonlight silver on my skin. When I open my mouth, poems fall like toads or pearls, and something here in the dark speaks my name, restores to myself. For just a few hours I leave behind me the small world we agree to live in where there is no wonder and no gravity, where all is light and glass, no shadows and no mystery, but this is not their life, it is mine, all mine, every minute of it my own and tonight I can smell the grass and the peppercorn tree and see stars through cloud like tiny pearls in silk, and hear the trains far away in the night.