Silent night

I have always been afraid of the dark. It began as a child, for the dark was home to all that was evil, all I had to fear. What lay waiting in the shadows, what lay waiting what I could not see. My eyes are taken away each night, and my parents slept deep down the hall. The single defense I had was to fall into slumber, until morning again came to banish all evil away and welcome me back to the world where the son and my brothers and sisters waited for me.

Now I am a man. Now I see all that happens in the day. Movement. Haste. Stress. Angry people and hateful people.

I sit by my window, searching for calm from this movement, and I hear voices. Airplanes. Cars and Sirens. Birds. Beasts. This sunlit world I love is awake and I can hear it moving.

Again, now at night, I sit by my window and something is different. No voices. No cars. Birds and beasts sleeping like my fellow humans. The world is asleep. I hear nothing, but my own breathing and the Roar of the sleeping world, the void and its light breeze.

I sit in the dark, like my boyish self petrified of what unknown things lie waiting in the shadows, but still I cannot ignore this wondrous silence I am surrounded with. Such silence.
My fear pleads with me not to surrender my guard, but I remind my human fear what terrible things it has led me to do to the unknown, to the misunderstood, to the feared.

I am feared.

Now I sit in the darkness, and I find my calm very easily as my world is asleep, and only I am left to observe.