It's 2:00 AM, and I've just finished eating my lunch. I'm sitting behind the desk at my overnight hotel job and the room is silent.

I know there are air handlers doing what they do to keep me warm, and computer fans keeping our machines cool, and other little noises whispering and sighing as buildings do while they sleep. But I can't hear them because I'm hard-of-hearing. My inability to hear the little sounds is a gift, given to me at birth, and one of my most illuminating features. In the silence I can hear more than anyone else can; little sounds available only to me, and all of the words left unsaid in the spaces between the ones I can hear. The room, just for me, is silent.

It's raining outside - a cold, cold rain mixed with snow. Little droplets freeze into tiny crystals on the ice-cold pavement, crunching beneath my boots when I walk outside. From the main doors I can see the water falling past the lightpost across the street.

That lightpost.... it's not unlike the one near my home, half an hour away from here. It stands so tall against the night sky, and it glows silently through the dark. A soft, orange pool of light flows over the ground beneath, where the water makes its silent impact. It's so still, so silent - yet somehow I can hear the rain falling past the lamp from where I stand. Little sounds in my mind's ear only, one tiny one for each drop I can see, making a euphonic hum as I look on in silence.

As I gaze into the pool of light and the halo of raindrops the world around me fades away and I am transported; gone to someplace else. Memories flood into my mind's eye: I can remember being a child in my parents' car, looking curiously at the streetlamps out the window; I can remember walking home from the church, holding my father's hand, too young to know yet that in this moment where we pass through a pool of orange light I am being looked upon by myself; I can remember the lamps partially illuminating the fountain from afar on the college grounds where I paced at night, as lost then as I have ever been but still restlessly drawn to the place where the pools of light and water meet.

Memories come to me which have never come to pass, but which are as real as the lamp before me: I am driving through the night to my friend's house to be with him and our circle, elated to know that we will all be reunited for years in this world without time; I am walking slowly along the boardwalk with my love's hand in mine, looking out over the water covered by fog so thick that I cannot see where sea becomes sky; I am sitting in my garden beneath starlit trellises in the soft glow of a groundslamp, enjoying the cool air and the soft ringing of my ears against the sound of the ongoing party in the house beyond the garden gate.

For a moment - only a moment - I live in the pool of orange light and in the garden and at the church and beside the fountain. For an instant I am in a place where time has no limit and the night goes on forever. For only a fleeting heartbeat the one inside me who loves, who makes music, who laughs and dances is brought to life.

But only for a moment; as then I am brought back to the space between my boots and my worker's cap, into the silent room which suddenly, somehow, isn't as quiet as it was before. I'm made aware that the lamppost is a hundred feet away, standing tall in the night sky, guiding raindrops to the frozen ground below.