The Echo of Empty Streets

It is 3:14 am. The silence in the hallway is thick enough to touch, a heavy velvet curtain that keeps the rest of the world at bay. In these hours, the ghosts of who we were seem to pace the floorboards, looking for a place to sit. We spend our days building walls of noise, pretending that the hollow spaces inside us don’t exist. But in the dark, the walls thin. You realize that the things you are most afraid of are not the shadows, but the stillness that forces you to listen to your own pulse. We are all just waiting for something to break the quiet, or perhaps we are waiting for the quiet to finally break us. There is a strange comfort in knowing that everyone else is asleep, leaving you alone with the truth you’ve been avoiding since sunrise. Does the night ever truly end, or do we just learn to hide the darkness better when the sun comes up?

Mirka Krivankova has captured this feeling in her work titled Christmas time in Hradec Králové. It holds that same quiet, frozen ache of a world left to its own devices. Does this stillness feel like peace to you, or something else?