dust, sunlight, and stillness.
4pm on a Sunday. The worst time of the week. Too late in the week to really start anything, but too early from Monday to properly begin. A universal phenomenon, I think: the boredom. Lazing in front of the television and wishing you had something to do.
But what makes this particular 4pm-on-a-Sunday so excruciating is the sunlight. I am sat down at the kitchen table with a bowl of noodles when I notice it. That harsh, annoying light so hot its simple glare heats up the entire room, as if summer wasn’t already hot enough. The staleness of the air doesn’t make it better either. Sweat leaks out my pores. I’ve got to take another shower. I eat my bowl of noodles in silence, but the silence is so loud it hums. It is now 4:30 p.m. I should do the laundry. I still have twenty pages of that book left to read. But because it’s 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, all I can do is sit there, watching the sunlight through the window.
I watch the stillness of the light, and the stillness of the air. I can feel it. It’s so incredibly stagnant. Not even a bird or a car to flicker through in glimpsing shadows. So perfectly still I could frame it, but because I cannot frame a ray of light, I just watch. I like how the light slants from the windows asymmetrically from all four sills, creating four perfect squares that move together in perfect sync as the sun sets. Then I notice the dust. Those small particles, barely noticeable, shining like glitter suspended in the air. Just somehow standing still. I wave my hand across it in a sudden motion, hoping to disturb the eerie stillness, but the air is so stale that all I do is move them slightly in a strange, organic matter. There is not enough momentum in the air for them to blow apart. And so I continue watching the dust, sunlight, and stillness of it all.
The heat is unbearable. It’s not like desert heat: how you can see the heat waves and feel the pain on your skin. It’s stuffy and hard to breathe in, like the air in the room is too lazy to escape. The air in your lungs is locked in. No matter how hard you try to breathe in, the air always stays, this idleness complemented with a ringing born from silence. When a room is static, with not even a hint of movement from a stray squirrel outside or the rustling of leaves, you can hear the ringing. It is pure silence. A form of life so lifeless, you hear it with perfect clarity. I like to think of it as our frequency: a pulsation reverberating through our bodies, unique to each person. But if you’re not careful, the ringing of the silence will swallow you. It will seize your mind and drive you insane until it’s all you can hear.
I blink once and snap back into reality. The ringing has almost consumed me with thought. The sun has shifted, its squares melting into rhomboids on the table, glittery with a hint of pink. The dust is gone, replaced by a soft wind that nuzzles the curtains and weaves itself fondly into my hair. Momentarily I think about the dust and the sunlight, and how quickly it transformed itself. A moment so ordinary, yet housing an entire universe all within itself.
A universe of dust, sunlight, and stillness.