You don’t fight the night. That’s the first thing they teach you. You don’t fight it, you don’t fill it. You let it come in and you stay inside your training like a safehouse. Breathe slow. Scan left, scan right. Trust what your body knows before your mind catches up. I’ve stood watch in worse places than this. I know how to be still.
But this night is doing something I haven’t felt before.
The birds are there – I can see them – but they’re making no sound. The wind is moving through the branches and yet every noise seems to fall somewhere it doesn’t return from. A well of silence, deeper than the dark. I scan the perimeter. Nothing. I check my own hands. Steady. I go back to the training. Breathe. Scan. Hold.
The air is trembling.
Not wind. Not movement. Something underneath movement. Like the moment before a sound, stretched out and stretched out until it becomes its own kind of roaring. I’ve been in rooms where something terrible was about to happen and I knew it before I knew it. The body registers what the mind hasn’t named yet.
This is that. But bigger. Whatever is coming is not coming from the edges of the crowd. It’s coming from somewhere I don’t have a word for.
I stay at my post. It’s all I have to do. It’s all I know to do.
Tonight, stay a little longer than you planned. And when the silence comes – notice what you reach for to fill it. Just notice. Don’t fix it. The soldier didn’t fight the night. He let it be as large as it was. You can too.
More about The Soldier: A Journey from Indifference to Witnessing
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