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.

to you

You have a penchant for appearing in the most uncalled for of places. How i'll catch a glimpse of you amongst the crowds in the city, craning my neck until you disappear around the corner, nonchalantly, with the familiar stooped gait. Or sandwiched between two bags and a wall in the lift, i'll spot the back of your head disappearing down the matthews corridor, towards the room.

It's not that I'm not over you. I questioned this when I noticed the gold-ish wedding band nestled on your finger, and my mind leapt into a time warp and we were back two years ago sitting back to back on the sand, pondering the meaning of love and fidelity and forever. Wondering what the hell you were doing out on maroubra beach at 11pm at night when you were really, according to your outbox, working on a last minute edit of a paper.

Inbetween the innocence of exchanged glances and conversations that didn't reveal too much, we'd somehow managed to pull off something perfectly logical at the time, and yet in retrospect was an episode of insanity, on one of our behalfs. I wrote more than i ever did when i was with you, and i thought it was beacuse you set me free. I thought we could go on in limbo forever.

In the end, forever lasted 10 months and i spent the next 14 trying to summon words that left my hands when you did. You picked up the pieces so fast i wondered if you'd ever been drawn in by the tide that embodied a dream. And today, when i opened your last present to me and found, scrawled in messy handwriting, words i hadn't noticed before, it all came rushing back.

So the moon still plays with our hearts, pushing and pulling along a midnight stretch of sand. I hope that next time you do appear, we can talk about the nothings and somethings of life now, and you can show me pictures of your family. Because only then will i know whether or not i've truly let it go.