Dark wood

I make my way upstairs, one step at a time. The staircase is built of wood, it’s wide and unlit. Each step makes a section of wood somewhere creak. It’s not creepy, just odd. Every little sound is a word uttered by the stairs, just for me. A light bulb hangs at the landing, casting a small yellow circle of light just beneath it but throwing everything else in shadow.


From the landing, there is a massive hallway that I walk down to get to my room. Mine is the last on the left, one of four, and it looks out onto the street. The hallway too is made entirely of wood. The doors to the rooms are shut by a small iron hook through which a padlock is looped.


The wood here, like on the stairs, is very dark brown. It has grooves and holes and shiny areas that have been worn away by repeated contact over time. The place must be hundreds of years old and yet the wood is so solid that it feels like it isn’t just holding the building together but it’s holding me together too. I feel a sudden certainty that if someone were to cut the walls, I would bleed, just a little.


The noises from the floor below me, where I had just eaten my dinner, are fading. I can still hear the people talking, laughing and eating, glasses chinking and cutlery scraping plates. There is music too, softly, from the television that plays in the corner. But with each step I take the wood steals the sounds away, absorbing them, slowly inhaling them from the air around me and hiding them in the walls and floor.


The growing silence gathers weight. A feeling of hollow emptiness resonates behind my ribs, little by little. As my feet pad across the wooden floor to my room a round space opens up right in the centre of my chest and every step opens it a little more. I imagine a tiny man inside my ribcage, a dirty-faced miner deep within the earth, working away with his pick and shovel, expanding the empty space around him bit by bit.


I insert the key into the padlock on my door, and it makes the smoothest sound, each section of the key fitting perfectly with the insides of the lock. I turn the key, click.


All the windows in my room are open and the thin curtains are flapping, letting the air in. The night is hot, the air is thick and I’m sweating just from this short walk to my room. I sit down on the edge of my bed and listen to the noises that come into the room, floating in the windows on the breeze and hovering around me like ghosts.


Despite these noises coming up from the street below, I am silent and empty. The miner continues to work away, happily oblivious and absorbed in his work. The sounds fade away and I’m left with nothing. And yet, this nothingness has sound, it's like a rushing vacuum in my ears, in my head.


I know the sound well. It only takes a second or two. Like spotting an old lover on the street, for a split second unsure if you know the face in front of you, then realising there's no doubt; not only do you know the face, you know it almost as well as you know your own. I know this sound, this silence. It is the sound of loneliness.

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