Writing Diaries #7

Finding Solace in the Quiet of Night

This story emerges from a collection of words I wrote down long ago. As I read it now, it sucks me into the past and I relive the moment and the emotions embedded in it

Hurry Up, Night!

The setting is a familiar one, Rue St-Dominique, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I imagine a night scene during a sweet, warm summer night, just before midnight. The picture has a soft focus showing a girl standing on the sidewalk in front of a few brick-clad row houses. Light from a streetlight illuminates the solitary girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, who holds her head tilted upward towards the dark sky. I suppose she’s picked out one of those pinpricks of light that pepper the heavens and is making a wish upon one of the stars.  These nights were my refuge from the chaos of the day.

Growing up I yearned for each night to come so that harsh words would stop coming at me, my parents ceased their demands for me to help out, and my father would be out of my sight and my hearing. At nighttime, when my mother was out of sight, I didn’t have to worry about collecting her tears in the silver cup I kept for the purpose.   

When night descended and I slipped into the double bed I shared with my younger sister, I gathered the white cotton sheet close and breathed in the scent of bleach and clean sunlight which the fabric had absorbed drying on the clothesline. Never mind that I spent my Saturdays doing laundry using the old wringer washer I coaxed into action by gently tapping the on-off lever with a hammer.

Cocooned by darkness, I spun waking dreams where my wishes came true: the boy next door who’d stolen my heart, who had no idea how I yearned for a word from him in the real world, became my boyfriend, and in another scenario I gave myself the power to hurl my father into oblivion.

Those waking dreams gave me the fuel to make it through the next day, helped me carry on through the yards of daily boredom and inured me to the horror of my helplessness.

The noises of the days bothered me and so did the harsh light of the sun on my skin. Human voices hurt my ears. My existence pained me; it exhausted me to talk, to eat, to walk. During the day, I felt as though I stood poised on the edge of a precipice and I comforted myself by fleeing into books whenever I could.

All the good memories from that time are tied to the night: muted conversations conducted in Italian, Greek, French, and broken English at the height of summer when the heat and humidity became unendurable in the superheated rooms indoors, which pushed the neighbourhood outside, hoping to catch a slight breeze.

The night was a place of solace and respite then. But as the years ticked by and my sadness deepened, bit by bit, night too turned into a fearful place, a prison I shared with the fiends conjured by my own mind.