Can you hear them? No, of course not. You never can. You never could. And these days? These days neither can I. Like cotton wool jammed in my ears, like white noise overload…the ‘real’ world blotting out the Other, muffling them…pushing them to the edges of awareness.
But silent does not mean gone. Silent does not mean vanished. Silent does not mean forever. Silence, does not last forever.
Where I am here, they are lost amongst the tossing waves, but only sometimes.
Sometimes I still catch a whisper, a whisper from amongst the white water…
“Come to us, fall to us, come play with us, we promise…your mother won’t even know you’ve gone.”
Whispers of things better, whispers of times past. Motion at the corners of my vision, voices at the edges of my hearing, meaning at the edges of speech…
I’m not crazy. I’ve never been crazy. My eyes are just open. Open and aware. And I know my history, I know my legends, and I know what they sound like. And I am not alone. You all look at us like we’re crazy, you see our nervous eyes and our quick step and the way we look over our shoulders at things you cannot see, and you pull your gaze away from us. The better not to think about it.
If you knew what we knew, if you could hear through the silence…you would not be so quick to dismiss us, or judge us so easily.
But, as with every year, you can’t hear them, and so pay us no heed, those of us who close ourselves in and turn up our movies and hide away from your grinning jack o’lanterns and sugar overdoses. Who watch from our windows as you guide your small fairies and hobgoblins through a night they do not understand…
We have never been crazy…but we can hear them…
Happy Halloween.