silence

SILENCE

I no longer know what I'm existing for, or what aim there is in everything i do. Silence permeates the air from the moment i wake til when i finally fall asleep, interrupted by staccato bursts of forced smiles and the daily repartee that you thrive on. Scrawls on toilet doors echo the loneliness blowing past - echoes that conversation and noise and time with any of you cannot stop.

Of course there's a void - even if I cant see it. I'd like to think i successfully filled it with each one of you that saved me from sinking just when it was becoming hard to breathe, but when you leave i realize it was just a bandage over the top.

Maybe I'll focus on describing the context, like always. Imagine the lull of peak hour traffic, a welcome break from the silence. Imagine, coffee from esmes, cigarette dangling from your index and third fingers, hand animated in conversation over this morning's news or last night's argument. As much as you said you hated it, i know you enjoyed us fighting towards the end, because making up after meant another two weeks in limbo until the next 3am torrents.

Esmes is no longer esmes. You've given up smoking, and stopped driving. Coffee now sits cold in your mug as you rush to go home, away from the suffocating impersonality of Matthews, to play happy families back home.

The magic of words left me when you took them away at the end of it. Relationships since then haven't been able to give them back, and I find myself approaching them all as rebound relationships - someone to help me forget that we once happened. And it is with hesitation that I'm writing again. The unhappiness at being the unseen is gone - the anger everytime we argued has left - the happiness that we once had has disappeared, and all that's left is an intoxicating blanket of sadness. The silence starves me of aim and of words and becomes a recurring theme, hiding on every page of readings i cannot focus on.