I have felt very alone in my life, so alone in fact that at times I have believed that I was the last person on earth. That was until the night I saw her. I crawled to my window in the still of the night longing to see something that would set my restless soul at peace, somewhere in the distance a car alarm wailed and a television screen warbled on but the night was almost dead in its silence. I stood gazing at the sky for there were no stars that illuminated the night. It was cold, fiercely cold. Eyes wandering past the trees and the church yard I searched for a thread of humanity in a world that I thought fraught with cruel and heartbreaking consequences.
Her pale skin was illuminated by the candle that rested on her windowsill. Her legs hung naked over the edge of the sill, swinging to the inaudible rhythm of the night. Her face was bathed in the candlelight; her lips were perfect in their silence. Long golden hair waved over her shoulders reaching just below her hip. In her slender fingers was a cigarette that she continually inhaled from, when she exhaled the grey smoke was turned golden in the light from the candle. I watched her as she gazed into the night; tears poured from her eyes, tears that I imagined had various reasons behind them. I knew not how to comfort her, knew only that I sympathized with her pain.
The world is full of people who gaze out of their windows at nights, wishing for time to reverse, wishing for a change in their lives, wishing for him to come back, wishing for her to love them again. These nameless individuals have become the silence of the night; their pain is etched in the starless sky, in the dead quiet of the evening air. That night I found them. Through her I met them, those whose eyes wander across the planes of insomnia.
That night I realized something that I have carried with me through my sleepless nights- I am not alone in my pain. There exists a secret society of night watchers. They stare at the darkness until the sky turns pink with the rising sun. The silence of the night screams with the pain of these people. That night I realized that when I felt so alone that I questioned whether life was worth living I need only sit on the windowsill and embrace the pain for I am not alone when I gaze at the night.
She sits there every night, sometimes I she looks down on me and our eyes meet in the darkness. We do not call out to each other, we do not offer words of condolences, we sit and we cry together when life becomes too much. The only comfort we receive from each other is the knowledge that someone else understands the hurt. It has become therapeutic; we have formed an understanding that should be impossible because a word has never been spoken between us.
We have become night watchers. Two lonely girls who find solace on the windowsill during nights when the pain is unbearable.