They often say that one can feel an intense calm just before a great storm.

I am not familiar with a calm of that nature or the storms it might accompany.

I have noted many occasions, however,  a calm, such as only the dead may rightfully comport. At those times the calm will settle  over everything as a pall to offer true emancipation in anonymity.

What it heralds, as faithfully as only a lover yet unknown, is not the storm of raging in its passion, nor the absolute destruction such a storm would call “companion”. 

It is not even the sedulous keening of harbingers soon to bear witness to the most heinous of atrocities. 

 No, the calm of such times, with which I am most familiar, unmitigatedly is the only appropriate precursor to the most complete and exact silence; that which can be nothing other than unapologetic apathy. 

With a pain so palpable, indescribable, and inescapable it is paradoxically evanescent in its very source and countenance.   

This silence, once it has delimited the object of its singular intent, offers solely   its inexorable quietude, broken only by the sound of my own mewling voice failing utterly to obviate the unavoidable and absolute isolation.                               

MF 06/06/09