Page 108 of Until the Storm Breaks
I shouldn’t watch.
But my finger hovers over the browser anyway. The festival site loads, and there it is: “Calvin Midnight LIVE - Starting Now.”
I click before I can talk myself out of it.
The connection takes a moment to load, and then there he is. The event space is packed, standing room only. Calvin’s at the podium, and even through my phone’s small screen, I can see something’s different about him.
“Thank you for coming,” he starts, and there’s something hollow in his voice. “I was supposed to read from my essay collection today. The one about grief, about loss, about finding meaning in the storm. But I’m not going to do that.”
He pulls out a piece of paper, folded so many times the creases have gone soft. “As many of you know, I haven’t published anything new in years. I’ve spent a lot of that time trying to figure out why. Why the words stopped. Why the sentences dried up. Why I couldn’t find the ending I thought I was writing toward.”
The audience has gone quiet now. This isn’t what they came for. They want the Calvin Midnight who has answers, who turns pain into Instagrammable quotes. Not this uncertain version.
“I went home recently. Dark River, Washington. My mother died.” He pauses, swallows. “While I was there, I reconnected with someone I’d met a handful of times, but hadn’t gotten to know. And when things got complicated,when things got real, I left. Because that’s what I do. I leave.”
I stop breathing. He’s really doing this. In public. On a livestream.
“But leaving doesn’t make the feelings go away. It just makes everything quiet. Empty.” He unfolds the paper fully, glances at it once, then looks directly at the camera as if he can see me through it. “I wrote this sitting alone in that silence. It’s the most honest thing I’ve written in years.”
Then he recites from memory:
The storm started the night you said
you could love me,
and we promised to lie still, intertwined,
until it passed.
Not lightning
only a slow, relentless rain.
Softer than truth,
harder than leaving.
Now I drink silence like whiskey.
Slow, sharp,
haunted by the echo
of what I didn’t say.
But I’ll sit here,
in the quiet wreckage of what we almost were,
and wait.
Until the storm breaks.
Or until I do.
The poem ends. Silence stretches through the auditorium, uncomfortable and raw. Then scattered applause starts, tentative and confused, but Calvin’s already walking off stage. No bow, no thank you. Just gone.
The livestream cuts to a confused moderator trying to fill dead air, but I’m not listening anymore.
