For each time in my life where I spoke without thinking, it seems these days that there are ten times for each of those, maybe more, where I think without speaking.
...And I don't know why.
Sometimes I actually feel as though silence is a better conductor of my internal, almost electric, synaptic responses to external stimulation and the words and actions of those around me.
It's as if I feel as though someone paying close attention should be, could be, hopefully would be able to read me like a book and in me discover what I cannot say, understanding better then I ever might speak with words.
Sometimes the constant reel playing in the theatre of my mind is far too complex and the progression is faster then my thoughts and sounds could convey.
This would follow along well with that old expression I heard a thousand times in my youth, "be seen, not heard".
Once that I can recall easily, I was able to successfully, without words, transfer my thoughts and absorb another living beings. The outcome was a series of mutually beneficial actions... and the story goes like this - - - -
A few years ago, when I began to have time to myself again, I was out at night. Where I live, there are no street lamps. The road lies low, weaving tightly between two steep mountains. On my ride home late through the dark, listening to music I love, I was startled by a returning reflection of my cars headlights. Something tall and dark loomed in the center of the street a few hundred feet up ahead. It was pitch black outside and so I decreased my speed, but not by much. I knew the road like the back of my hand. The closer I got to whatever it was, the less I understood what it might be. Not until I passed it, did I realize it was a horse, standing like a statue near the center line. Seconds later, I spun my car round, pulled to the side and left it running and I walked carefully, with caution in confusion to the big, beautiful animal.
When I was within inches of it, no idea what to do, it and I began a dance of sorts. One of us would move slightly toward the other and which ever one of us felt put upon would step back and so on, until it was more then apparent that neither of us knew exactly how to proceed, for what seemed like an eternity. I spoke then, but not effectively. I believe I said, "What do you want?"
The horse didn't tell me what it wanted, but I figured it out. Somehow one of us read the others thoughts and eventually we began walking side by side towards a ranch with a house, the only inhabited place within a mile or more. It sat closer to the mouth of the mountains between which we both reside. It would stop and I would stop. I would go and it would go. At some point, I touched it at it's long neck clumsily and we began that dance again. It stepped back then forth, I sprang backwards then shuffled close again. There came a point were I slide my hand beneath it's harness and walked a ways with my palm happily touching it's warm, wet, silky jaw. I felt powerful beside the horse and I felt connected and I noticed the silence around me, but not the darkness, because something so large, when so close, seems bigger then the night itself.
We clicked down the road together. Its hooves, my heels clacking, like out of sync tap dancers, who are thrilled to be moving and unfazed by our poor timing.
It steered itself into what I guess was its home, where it likely had escaped from earlier. The place dully disappearing into the outline of night was foreboding and drab, smelled like hay and horse. Because it was late and because there was no sign of human life, only equine snorts and shuffles from stalls I could smell but not see, I let my companion into the center ring, where a fence might contain it, or so I hoped.
It didn't seem too thrilled to be home. It didn't appear to want me to go and I didn't feel all that glad about ending everything that suddenly seemed like something much more then I realized when I first turned my car around.
The horse watched me go, walked me to the end of the fencing and stood still until I could no longer see it's darkness against dark as I went further and further away.
It was one of the loneliest walks of my life, back to my car. The black road, the black night, and a blackness seeping in, replacing the incredible rush of feelings I realized I experienced only now, so dramatically apparent in the horse's absence.
When I woke in the morning, I heard utensils shuffling from my kitchen below, which meant my visiting mother was awake and moving. I felt the warmth of my little boy's still sleeping body next to me in my bed and in the palm of my hand, I smelled the horse. I closed my fingers around it.
I don't have the words to tell you how I felt that night or why. I just felt...
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