Dead Time
"Every day a little death... in the heart and in the head."
-Stephen Soundheim, from A Little Night Music
She was afraid of death – afraid of it in all its forms. Death by car accident, by drowning, murderous death, death by one’s own hand, or death in old age, she hated it all.
She knew she was not alone in this, but her fear went further than most’s. She felt uncomfortable coming to dead stops and hated dead ends. She even shied away from those claiming to be dead certain – or dead wrong.
But the death of she was truly afeared was dead time.
Dead time was time of waiting, but it was more than that. It was still and uneasy. It felt heavy, foreboding, and worst of all, infinite and inescapable.
She knew that many people had encountered dead time and had not had an enjoyable experience, but like other deaths, she doubted that anyone dreaded it quite as much as she did.
The dead time that most came in to contact with occurred at night. When everyone was asleep and the silence felt – almost literally – deafening, it was easy for air to lay heavy on their shoulders, stifling their mind, their heart and only allowing dreaded thoughts to enter. But the dead time she most feared was not the eerie and seemingly appropriate time of sleepless night, but that of too-innocent late afternoon.
It was her most frightening period of waiting because she was never sure what she was waiting for, or even if she was truly waiting for anything at all. The day’s work was done by then, but the evening’s work was yet to come, leaving a dangerous interval of time that cried plaintively to be filled, but that, as hard as she tried, she could not. And so she sat in silence for those few but never-ending hours with no anticipation to bring life to the numbness. Instead, the aging and suffocating sun burned a deeper hole in her soul while it, too, waited fearfully for this day’s death.