Coming down

A journal entry shortly after returning home from my holiday in Shanghai...

***

I'm sitting inside my stillness with pianos and guitars swimming around my ears. I can taste the silence of winter in the night air and for the first time this year I notice how abruptly the sun has run away from the afternoon. It's that silence of a quiet November walk on the west coast in the air, though this Far East home of mine has barely slipped past the advent of Mid-Autumn Festival. Quiet, solo nights lie ahead. Maybe I'll cram them full of chatter and TV and words, and although I can find comfort inside the company of others, I keep my phone silent and ignore the footsteps which may patter outside my door. Night's here... my night, and it's one of those times where home is here while remaining thousands of miles beyond the horizon.

I've been here countless times before, as if standing at the door of my childhood home. But the sense of what awaits me is much different, both cold and friendly, warm and sombre, all at once. I can't decide what colour it evokes... maybe a blue of the wintry moonlit ocean, or of the impossible purple hue in the late stages of a prairie sunset. Maybe it's the translucent black of a clear, starry, moonless midnight. Whatever it is, it remains immense and, while foreboding, is not wholly unwelcome.

I don't bother standing against it, but curl into the corner of the sofa so it can envelope me. I know I'll wake in the morning, possibly in the rays of the sunrise. All that needs to be done is to wait patiently for the warm rise of the early sun in the eastern sky.

T