Driftwood

I only really saw the day for the first time at about three o'clock, after everything had been packed away and the chairs straightened and we could take a moment to stand in the emptiness and breathe in and think, yes, silence is golden, the sort of golden that licks at the edges of things and alights for a moment on the dustmotes falling slowly back to earth, the sort of golden that softens everything and expands it and makes the spaces where things are not into a thing of almost painful beauty.

I wonder why it's only after a very large noise that you can hear silence so clearly.

I put the last chair back into line, and give it an absent stroke, and it's then I notice that the gold is coming from outside.

Has it been like this all day? I ask my partner.

I don't know, she says.

We stand on the doorstoop for a moment or two, dazed. The air has a sharp edge to it, and it's so thin that the winter sun pierces clean through it, picking out every grain and leaf in blinding relief.

I find a spot on the low stone wall outside and close my eyes. Listen, I say.

She sits beside me, tilts her head to one side.

The river, she says, opening her eyes. It's funny how I'm here so often and never hear it.

Some other people start to drift out, exchanging a greeting or two before taking a seat on the wall and lapsing into silence. We roll up our sleeves, or lean back to expose a neck or a midriff to the suns rays, making an offering of our bare skin on the last day of the sun's reign.

In a little while I will get up, and one by one they will too, to pick up the thread of their day again, but for a few quiet moments on a Tuesday afternoon we were all there together drinking in the gold of silence.