STARTLED

On nights following a long day of work, tired and exhausted, as you stretch out on the cot and close your eyes to the darkness around, welcoming a refreshing sleep –

those moments - when the stiffness of your body is about to surrender to melting comfort of sleep; when your heart and soul seem to have come across beneath a star embellished sky for a candid togetherness post a long, weary stretch of being apart – that a startling sound from somewhere suddenly eludes your sleep and precisely that very moment of laying wide awake in the darkness with your mind casting a series of “What was that sound?” questions and your heart dismissing it under the tag of ‘Anything’, which can range from the honk of a car, to the shriek of an infant, to a glassware toppling from the edge of table to a thousand shards along the floor; is what my entire concern is all about. 

The very surrendering moment of being caught unaware, startled by a sound from something, anything, and made to lay hard awake in the dark with an unfed inquisitiveness, is how love happens to us.

It is a sleep-robbing startling sound in the dark that shakes up our soul from the setting of a great, great sleep and leaves the body hurting with insomnia…forever.