Dag had not expected the dark to change what he heard.
He had expected to miss the light, and he did, especially in the first weeks: the disorientation of coming home to an unlit street, feeling for the candles on the kitchen shelf. By December he had stopped missing it. By February he had stopped noticing its absence.
What he noticed instead was Lena.
Not in the way people mean when they say they noticed their partner again. He had always noticed Lena: her presence, her movements, the particular way she held a mug. He was not a man who had stopped paying attention. He had told himself this for seventeen years and believed it.
The dark taught him he had been wrong about what attention was.
They went to bed earlier, the way their bodies demanded once the screens were off and the rooms went dark by eight. They talked more, lying in the dark the way he remembered lying in the dark as a child, when the absence of light had made the presence of voice more available. She told him things he had never heard. Not secrets: she was not a secretive person. Just stories she had never found occasion to tell, details of her life before him that had not fit into any lit conversation.
One night in March she told him about the year she spent, at twenty-four, working on a fish farm on an island so small it did not appear on most maps. She had been there alone except for the other workers, had been the only one who spoke her language, had gone six months without speaking to anyone who knew her history. She described the particular quality of that loneliness as something that had not harmed her but changed the shape of her. She said: I became someone smaller and also someone larger. She said: I could not explain this to anyone when I came back.
Dag lay in the dark and listened.
He had known Lena for seventeen years. He had not known this. He lay still and felt, in the dark, the specific weight of a person he had been next to for seventeen years and had not finished knowing.
He wanted to tell her something in return. He searched for what it was. He found, to his surprise, that he had things he hadn't said, not because they were difficult but because they had not seemed to require saying: that she was the best decision he had ever made, that he was afraid of losing her not to death or disaster but to the accumulating weight of small inattentions, that the last several months had been the closest he had felt to her in years and he did not understand why the dark had done what seventeen years of daylight had not.
He said some of this. Not all of it. The dark made some things possible and others more difficult.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: I know.
Then: I've been waiting for the dark.
He lay with that for a long time.
The Dark Year would end in October. He did not know what would happen when the lights came back. He did not know if this quality of listening, this new slowness, this available silence, would survive the return of everything that crowded it out. He had been trying to practice it in daylight. It was harder. The light asked too many things of the eyes.
He lay in the dark in the third month of the Dark Year and listened to Lena breathing and hoped it was something he had learned and not something the dark was simply lending him.