Static

Turn the television past its last channel
and you'll catch it—a hiss so old
it doesn't belong to the room.

They say a little of that noise
is not the antenna, not the wiring,
not the neighbor's failing microwave.
It is the faint remnant of light
from the universe's earliest moments,
stretched thin across billions of years
until it became this instead:

a whisper with no consonants,
a trace of what came before,
leaking through your grandmother's
old rabbit ears.

I think about that when I can't sleep—
how the room is never truly silent,
how some small fraction of the dark
behind my eyes might carry
a trace from the beginning,

from a time I cannot imagine,
when the heavens were not yet
what my eyes know them to be.

Still arriving.
Still passing through.
Still beyond anything
I could name.

And I think of how I fail
to make sense of my own small darkness,
propped up on one elbow at 3 a.m.,
practicing what I'll say to you tomorrow,
getting no further than the hiss of breath
before the first word.

Maybe that's what static really is—
not a broken signal,
but the sound of something
we cannot quite receive:

a faint remainder,
a trace moving through the dark,
reminding us how little
we can hear of what surrounds us.

So when the screen goes grey
and the room fills with that soft roar,
don't reach to fix it just yet.

Listen.

Not for a voice in the noise,
not for meaning where there may be none—

but for the quiet reminder
that creation is larger
than anything we can hold
inside a sentence,

and some things remain
beyond our hearing,

beyond our knowing,

while we sit in the dark
and listen.