Why the Darkness Prays

There is a sound I hear some nights, in my house, or in the streets if I cannot sleep and instead decide to go walking. In the sand streets on this island, my steps make no sound. The small noise of my breath is the only thing to give my presence away. But I feel certain that no one can hear me. If they are awake, they are wishing they were asleep. They are listening for, counting in fact, their own breaths. If they are asleep, they are gripped inside the hands of dreams. They are too busy to hear someone walking by, out of the grip of their dream.

NO, it is a particular sound I hear some nights. Not snores drifting from windows in houses, or wind ruffling the palm trees. Not even the sound of water breaking at the shore. No, the sound I hear is the voice of night. The language of the darkness itself. A low, musical voice that stirs in the shadows. It is, I know, the darkness praying. And hoping, of course, that things might change.

The darkness prays that it might rise up and out of itself. Somehow. That it might leave the eternal cage of night and live, if only for a short in the light. That it will not always be this way, condemned to the only. fate it knows. Has ever known.

But of course this cannot change, this fact of the darkness, no matter how lonely it is. After all, any prayer of supplication only carries so far. it is such a very long way to heaven. A prayer cannot be heard everywhere at once. At the shoreline whispered from palm fronds, sliding so sadly off the roofs of simple huts. Even this prayer, uttered by the night itself, cannot change a thing.

But here and there, the prayer makes a sound, straining to be heard. I come across it in shadows and sometimes in the moonlight. It sounds like a small and weary song, tired of being sung. The prayer is audible because it sounds like nothing else in the world. And because it is so unbearably desperate. I cannot sleep with the sound of such desperation. I walk the sand streets, somehow hoping to comfort the darkness. Tell it that it is not alone. Most nights.

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