Traffic noise on the street is a constant refrain. Music and shouting, cans rolling on the pavement, angry cats fighting, neighbors clamoring for all the air and space they can grab and it never stops. The noise inside me that no one else can hear is just as deep and loud and even though it’s silent, and although I don’t invite it in, it crashes through the door and then won’t leave. I have dreams at night that won’t let me alone when daylight comes, and the next night I dream about the dream from the night before filled with worry and trouble and no control over anything that will happen and walking through mud on legs weakened and weighted and pulling breath into lungs that refuse to inflate. Tornadoes roar an approach and children won’t listen to me to run, and run now, and I can’t gather them in and the wind is screaming and I know with visceral conviction that a suffocating nimbus of death is coming. The noise of my dreams drowns me with their weight in the quiet of the night. My husband sleeps beside me with his hand resting steady and warm on my hip and I lay awake rooted and listening to the noise thrumming through my head, amplified and booming in the dark.

In the morning the coffee drips and I slowly let in the lighted world and my fuzzy-headed waking isn’t strong enough or discerning enough to sift all the information accumulated while I slept and movie stars are misbehaving, and drones are striking and cranky people are bitching about life and it’s snowing again and bad grammar and the things they cannot escape or will not, and I can’t stay away, I have to know it and read it and listen to it and watch the clips and connect and comment because I’m certain my small weak thoughts will power a change and I have to read about the wrongs and the troubles because it is my duty as a voting citizen with all of society and my family and my friends on my shoulders and rail against the injustice that is living, until I want to throw it down and walk away to the shower. I scrub and scrub with hot water and peppermint soap with the water pounding my face and the soap blocking my ears and I think this is what it sounds like deep under Niagara Falls below the foam of the falls breaking where it is tons of pressure in that sonic boom of power and I ponder aromatherapy and the search for peace through my nose and think that if I just knew more I’d be set and quiet at last, and then I’m towelling dry my hair and my ears clear and the noise starts again as the sound of the water drips away and my list of obligations begins to shout at me and I know I’m running out of time to get it all done before I have to leave for work and all I want is a day or two or a week of quiet that is quiet.

How do I explain to the people I love and who love me that I need to be away from them to hear myself? It hurts the ones I run to daily for refuge and help, for calming and care like my husband and my parents, sisters and brother and friends and their eyes and the set of their shoulders say isn’t this good enough and haven’t we been here to prop you up all those times when you sucked out our energy and our patience and we gave it and gave it freely and willingly until it was gone and now it isn’t enough after all? Well thanks a lot and go then, but they’re hurt by my desertion, and when I’m really looking for the quiet I have to run away or drive away or send others away and then I choose my company carefully. My notebook. My fountain pen. My hiking boots. My camera. My orange cat. My night under the moon. Just watching, alone, on my dark porch.

The moon at night is quiet, known and unknowable, a pearl out of reach, and the trail through the pine and oak forest is quiet, pulling hectic energy out of me and dissipating it in the cedar scented breeze, and I could ask you to come but would you hear the quiet and let it be or would you try to fill it to lay claim to it and name it?

That’s the risk right there.