Storm at Night

 The storm began at about one o'clock in the morning. The lightning came first, which at first the man mistook for headlights hitting the long window in the wall opposite the bed. He tried to go back to sleep, but then the thunder came and the drumming rain and the repetitive barrages of lightning. He rolled to his left side, reached for the phone on the bedside table, turned it on. There were no messages. There had been no calls. What had made him hope that there might have been? Hope. He was sitting now on the side of the bed, wondering whether he should smoke a cigarette, thinking that it might be somehow medicinal. Something to fill the yawning emptiness in his chest, something to loosen the insoluble knot in his stomach. Standing, moving stiffly forward, guiding himself by touch, refrigerator, sink, counter, stove, he found the cigarettes and moved on to the door. Mark Twain was wrong. It is not difficult to navigate a small room in the dark. The world is not full of sudden surprises, vast spaces, impossible furniture. It is spare, brutally familiar, forever unchanged whether night or day. Everything is the same. It is only all the room inside oneself that is changed, in the darkness, in the silence, in the storm at night. Never in all his life had the man imagined that he would be alone in the end.