Interrupting Nothing

At 4:00 am last night I was woken up by two people screaming their lungs out at each other. I was jolted out of sleep and heard the screaming stabbing me directly in my ear. My first reactions were anger. The location of the racket seemed to change from outside of my window to somewhere outside on a floor above me. The placement effortlessly blended from one to the next the way it can when you are wired but actually more asleep than awake and the world is sharp-edged but also wobbly and elastic. As the energy and gibberish morphed into understandable words, I lost the feelings of anger towards them and I just became very annoyed. It was clear the two young people were verbally tearing each other down, and to hell with the time of night or any sense of privacy about it. As it became obvious, though, just how in each other’s crosshairs they were, my next reaction was to be slightly afraid, like someone afraid of watching a living storm boil over outside and worried that it might somehow notice them.

The young woman was in a rage, saying “fuck” in its many varied mutations, and the young man replied, with slightly less bite than the woman, “Shut your whore mouth! Shut your whore mouth! Shut your whore mouth!” Beyond this I never could figure out what was being said, or what they were arguing about. The shouting continued and eventually the woman started stretching her words out with screeeEEEAAAAMMMMMMS to where even if I could have understood her before, it was no longer possible.

There wasn’t any real sense of time though. It felt simultaneously as if they had been arguing for moments and for an hour. At some point I started to fade again back to sleep, and the energy was burning off from the two young people as well, apparently.

As my collateral turmoil faded and sleep began to ink back in blackly, I heard the woman heatedly rocket off her words, but everything had become quieter and muffled staccato-sounding. The world was losing focus and going quiet itself, I thought about the woman’s upturned anger and was struck by how she was a conduit for words flowing fluently out of her. “Look at you go!” I thought. A rocky babbling brook would have recognized its kin in listening to her fire away with not a single stumbled syllable. As if the noise of life was unwittingly on a conveyer belt moving away, the world was becoming transparent and the woman’s voice seemed to fade easily from existence. Her energy and passion and anger remained clear, and it was almost the last thing I remembered. But the space and stillness, the same space and stillness I had been interrupted from, helped me detach from her emotions and just hear her now meaningless syllables, and it was like watching a thunderstorm, but this time from a safe vantage point. Something for something. For all the matter black holes devour, even they emit x-rays. And for all the ugliness and apparent lack of love that was put into that was put into this couple’s arguing, the space and stillness nevertheless hushed the situation and produced something subtle and beautiful.

And then they were gone. I guess it was hours later. I have no memory of falling asleep or waking up. I just remember becoming aware that it was quiet, like nothing had ever been disturbed.

And at that point between being awake and asleep, where the world is thin and doesn’t have any apparent rules, and everything fades like daylight during dusk, perhaps nothing can really be disturbed.
-->