Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

I typed up another noises spark, because I was sitting here writing the other one when I realized how much I love my Moonroom. BAM inspiration.

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend*

A train whistles in Old Town Helena, the echoes so close together that it seems to be just one long note.

I love the middle of the night.

When the echo dies down, there aren’t many other noises. The crickets chirp faintly, but I know it’s almost deafening out in the country. Here, it’s just a pleasant ambiance that they provide. I can hear one of my cats running around sometimes, chasing bugs, yelling, clawing up another piece of furniture. The house settles every now and then. A dog barks twice.

There are no frogs, no traffic. There are no screeching tires, no geese honking or crows cawing, no sirens, no talking/yelling, no slamming doors or stomping of feet.

Everything is calm and serene.

My environment is important to me. I realized this when my therapist pointed it out. That’s why I’ve taken over my parents’ new sun room and made it my “Moonroom” at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. The absolute tranquility of this time of day, combined with being outside but not really, and candles make it my favorite place to be at my favorite time of day.

My big black boy cat Anubis (Nubi for short) comes out to greet me. He talks to me in his little smoker’s chirp, jumping onto the couch and all over my homework. It’s so quiet that I can even hear my fingernails scratching against his scalp, his swallowing in the middle of his turbo-purring.

My mind itself is never this quiet.

*First lyric of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”

Here is a picture of my Moonroom:

...and also a link to the song where I got the title.