The Spark Is Patient Too
An essay by Spike Humer
5 min readMost of the leaving is quiet.
Not a door slammed, not a departure anyone could mark. Just a slow drift out of the room while my body stays in it. I am here — at the desk, in the chair, in the conversation — and I am also gone, folded so far into my own thoughts that the hours pass without me. I come to and find that time has moved and I did not move with it.
I know the room I am in. I know where people are standing, how close, which way they are turned. That awareness never leaves me. What leaves is the rest — what I am feeling, what is happening under the surface, the weather inside my own chest. I can read everyone but myself.
The condition has a temperature, and the temperature is flat.
Not grief, which at least is something. Not even sadness, which has a shape you can hold. Just the low hum underneath the day — ambivalence, a little frustration, disappointment worn smooth from handling, and beneath all of it the apathy that makes the others hard to tell apart. This is the room I disappear into. It is not dramatic. That is the thing about it. It is so undramatic that I can live inside it for a stretch and not notice I have gone.
It comes in stretches. Sometimes a single day, sometimes two or three strung together, most often when I haven’t been sleeping. And sometimes longer than that, longer than I’d choose to say. But it moves through. I have learned that much about it, even when I’m inside it and can’t feel the edges — it moves through. It has always, so far, moved through.
And then something sparks.
It is always small. That is what I have come to understand about it. I keep waiting for the return to arrive as an event — some threshold I cross, some morning I wake up restored. It never comes that way. What comes is a spark. A flicker of creative charge. A single thought of hope, or of possibility, rising up out of the flat where nothing was rising before.
It does not come from outside me. No one calls me back by name. The sound in the room does not do it. It comes from inside — the one part of me that can still catch, catching. I do not walk back into myself. I flicker on.
The last time it happened, nothing had been solved.
A concern I had been carrying eased — not gone, only stepped back a few days, the way a storm sometimes moves offshore without dissolving. I knew it hadn’t left. I said so to myself even as the relief arrived. And alongside the relief came something forward-leaning: a small optimism about the work I love, the writing I keep returning to when I let the energy return to me.
The two things came together and my breath let go. Then a deep inhale, and the inhale lifted me. That was the whole of it. A threat that stepped back a few feet, a flicker of hope about my own work, and a body that remembered how to breathe.
Nothing had resolved. The self surfaced anyway.
I think this is the part I had wrong for a long time.
I believed the self I kept losing was waiting for me on the other side of my troubles — that once the pressure lifted, once the thing was finally handled, I would come home to myself and stay. But the pressure does not lift. It steps back and returns, steps back and returns. If I waited for it to be gone, I would wait forever.
The self is not waiting on the far side of anything. It is waiting for the smallest gap. It will take a few days’ reprieve. It will take one thought of possibility. It asks for almost nothing as permission to surface — only a little room, only a little air.
The spark that lifted me that day held longer than a breath. It carried me here, to the page, to the work. The flat will close over it again — I know the hum, and I know it is patient. But I have started to notice that the spark is patient too. However far I drift, something in me keeps catching. It has not failed to yet.
And if it asks so little of me — a few days’ reprieve, one thought of possibility, a narrow gap in the pressure — then maybe it asks little of anyone. Maybe the self you have been missing is not waiting on the far side of your troubles either. Maybe it is closer than that. Just under the hum, intact, ready to catch.
You have been waiting the whole time. Not far away.
—sh