Time: After dark. The sky is perhaps, just perhaps, one shade paler than full night. It is quiet. No birds sing. No breeze rustles the leaves. In the distance, a single frog croaks its tune.

My ears grasp at something. Is it only my imaginings of distant sounds or is there something there? There. The honk of a single goose announcing he is settling down for the night on the pond half a mile away. A moth fritters at the light, casting a shadow. A few lights pierce the dark, no larger than the stars overhead. The only sound is my pen scratching across paper.

Overhead, the dipper empties stars into the black of the cosmos, pouring light into the dark for eon upon eon, since before humans named it thus.

--

Little sounds scratch the surface of the greater silence, the silence no one can hear, the silence no sound can disturb. Perhaps the trees understand this silence, a little. The rocks know it.
From great silence I came and into great silence I will go.

Sound lasts for only a moment. In the silence, sound is an aberration between silences. Silence awaits my return.

Does the knowing of sound change the silence? Is to silence returned different from the unknowing silence of before? Does the memory of sound forever change the silence that follows? I have no answers. There is only silence.