Michael Harding: ‘Thank you for your love,’ I wrote to a friend. Then I tore it up

In the old days I used to read my columns out loud before completing them, just to hear the silence between the words. It was a way of ensuring that the columns carried enough silence to pleasure the reader. But that all changed in the lockdown. The problem now is finding stories, because I’m cut off from the people I usually write about. The only person I meet is the beloved.

And we spent most of February gazing at the bird boxes which she had attached to the trees on St Brigid’s Day. But other than birds flitting about in the cold weather, there wasn’t much drama or story to write about.

We uttered small cries of intimacy across the table every morning, as we munched All-Bran and pumpkin seeds, but apart from that we were as silent as desert monks. And when there’s nothing to talk about, silence becomes a solitary confinement.

The silence between musical notes is delicious. And the silence between sentences in a story can be a door into imagining. But when there are no stories, and there is nothing but silence, then there is no imagining.

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I tried writing letters and emails recently, but during a lockdown such communications become too intense and sincere. And as the General often remarks, there is nothing as boring as mere sincerity.

“Thank you for your love,” I wrote to a friend. “I long for your return; your presence is like a wine that comes before the grapes are even planted.”

Reading back over the letter made me squeamish. I was worried my friend might suspect me of gorging on magic mushrooms or other hallucinogenic fungi, so I tore it up.

In fact I don’t touch any mushrooms, and I am conservative about all forms of psychedelic ecstasy; for me solitude itself is quite sufficient for inducing quasi-mystical experiences.

One day I was walking with the beloved up the hills. She was ahead of me on the pathway when I imagined I was looking at the person she was, before she was born; something of her essence manifested in the frame of her body and the way she moved up the slope.

And one night in the garden under a full moon, I had the same sensation regarding myself; I felt I was experiencing my own presence as it was, even before I was formed in the womb.

Both moments were like light shimmering through a crack in the mundane world, and I’m assured by the General that such numinous or spiritual moments are not uncommon during long periods of isolation.

Last week I woke in the middle of the night, worrying about a hospital appointment the following day. Would I get there in time? Would I find a parking space? Would I need to visit a toilet on the way? And what might the doctor say about my heart? Was I eating too many slices of banana cake?

I felt like a child in the dark as I left the house, frightened of the silent roads, the abandoned villages and empty unknown spaces along the way.

I stopped at a filling station half way to Dublin: anxiety is a great tormentor of the bladder, and by then I was desperate for a toilet.

I risked a coffee and as I was coming out the door I caught a few phrases of conversation.

“You marry someone,” a woman was telling her friend at the seating area outside the door, “but years later he changes and you end up living with someone different”.

I sipped my coffee in the car, gazing at the pair of them from a distance, and longing to know what they were saying or how they were concluding the narrative.

In the hospital, a doctor examined my chest and encouraged me to keep taking the tablets and eat less banana cake. And then like Cinderella I went straight home.

There was a stretch in the evening so I went into my studio and sat gathering memories from the day, like flotsam from an ocean of silence, until a few sentences lay scattered on the page before me. The beloved appeared in the doorway, the evening light behind her, and I could sense something important had happened.

“There’s a blue tit in one of the boxes,” she declared.

It felt like a tectonic shift in the cosmos. And at last I had something to write about; a filter through which to savour the ocean of silence that people call the lockdown.