If it wasn't for the nights

The nights are awful. The house is so quiet, even if the TV's turned up loud, even if the rain is pouring and strong winds are rattling the roof. Even then, I can hear the silence.

It starts around 5pm or so, when Nigel used to get home from work, and gets more intense as the evenings wear on. Routines like making some dinner or feeding the dogs don't help. Nothing really does. Instead, everything just makes me notice the silence all the more.

I go to bed early these days (usually early-early, not Arthur early), mostly so I can shut out the silence by sleeping. I generally fall asleep reasonably quickly because I'm always so tired. But then I wake up during the night, and I reach over to Nigel's side of the bed, but he's not there, of course. One of the furbabies might be there, but, much as I love them, they're not what I'm reaching for, they're not who I'm missing.

Morning eventually nears, and I usually wake up while it's still dark. I lie there pretending that I might fall back to sleep, but I seldom do. I get up, earlier than I should, and start my day. The silence starts to recede as the sun rises. Then it returns again at the end of the day. And that cycle repeats.

The video above is ABBA performing their song "If It Wasn't For The Nights" from their 1979 album Voulez-Vous. I'm pretty sure I played the album a lot when it was new, so much so that my mother started to call it "that album with a beat". She eventually decided she liked it, though. A little more than a year after the album was released, my mother was dead. But that never made me think of that ABBA album. To be fair, I haven't thought about the album in years. But now the refrain of that song is stuck in my mind on an endless loop:

If it wasn't for the nights
(If it wasn't for the nights I think that I could make it)
If it wasn't for the nights
(If it wasn't for the nights I think that I could take it)

Usually, having a song stuck in my head is annoying, but this one at least helps drown out the silence. That's a good thing. In the day, I manage really well, and, an occasional cry notwithstanding, I feel almost normal (so called…) in the daylight. And then it gets dark again. "Somehow I'd be doing alright if it wasn't for the nights (If it wasn't for the nights I think that I could make it)."

Apparently, humans can't just hibernate, so I have to endure this daily ritual. I know this awful feeling will eventually get better. But until then, I'd be doing alright if it wasn't for the nights.

Originally published on my personal Facebook Page on October 2.