quiet

My friend Erin left this morning for Namibia, after a long and loving goodbye party last night that started at a bar and ended up hours later at my house with whiskey (which I avoided) and pizza (which I didn't) and people in my kitchen and bedroom hanging out until I forced them all out onto the cold foggy streets of Edinburgh at midnight so I could go to bed and watch the room spin. Spinning rooms is the reason I rarely drink red wine anymore. Then our friend Nathan came over for breakfast and more farewells and there were suitcases to pick up and hem and haw over and eggs to be eaten and then the real farewell and then the inevitable sad little text messages from the woman with long hours moping in an airport in London on her hands, before the journey really begins, the journey you don't come back from, or you return from strangely changed, the attempt to enter and understand another world.

My friend Erin left this morning, and when I came home late this afternoon I walked into a house shrouded in silence, blanketed in quiet. Quiet like the tendrils of the fog, lying over everything. It's been so frantic, so much worry and concern and love these past few months--for before Erin there was Laura, who is in Africa now too--so many outings and talks and meals and quarrels.

The quiet is palpable. I can reach out my hand and touch it. I can feel my heart beating. I can hear the wind in the garden, roaring and ceasing, roaring and ceasing. The alarm clock is ticking like my grandfather's beautiful old clock that hung on the wall in Kijabe, with the iron hands, so loudly I want to bury it deep.

I have so much to do and yet I have stopped dead, paralyzed by all this stillness. By the cessation of life swirling around me, lives heard through the thin wall between the two bedrooms, tugging me along, and me tugging them too.
It's so quiet.