Play It Again, Sam

I've been thinking about this one lately. I think because I wrote it during a winter week in Calgary that felt more like fall evenings in Victoria.

Like what being outside feels like right now. Like what missing the city a little feels like.

Secrets
When you get right down to the heart of it, every city is the same. Even the sounds are equal across continents.

But each place has it's very own brand of silence.

The breath of the trees, the whisperings of brick, the scrutiny of the streetlights.

That electric, suspended calm before the first raindrop of a summer storm falls, the quiet that is a soft curtain woven through beads of rain strung from clouds.

The sound of frost on windows.

Of autumn leaves changing color.

The turning of a snowflake that does not fall with it's own weight but as an accent to the currents of air that wind their way between the buildings.

The changing face of the moon.

The sound of a city asleep, the silence that is constant and so constantly unheard by those who live there.

To know the silence of a place is to know it's soul. The ringing of the church bell is half the music, silence is the other half.

In a time of an inner autumn, when in returning from work I think October thoughts under grey winter clouds, I hear the city's silence and I know it's secrets.

For I think they are much like mine.

Hiding in a the stillness unspoken between the sounds. Crouched in a hesitation, existing unseen and unknowable. Just....right... there.


February, 2004