on swallowing (s)words
Tonight everything is fleeting. I miss your presences, even if you shy away from my touch. I miss how you make the air alive and the light more full, how you look at me not through me, acknowledge my presence and value it. I miss the lines on my face that appear when I laugh.
What we can say with no words is astounding to me sometimes. What you don't say to me when I walk in the door, when I wake up and pass you in the hall, when we go about our everyday tasks in silence. What you say to one another when I am the space in between. It leaves me clamouring for something more, maybe something I had before, but certainly nothing people say to each other with words. And it's difficult to do so without them.
The back of your head tells me you think I rob you of time. Your short words ensure I know what I'm worth to you. Your terse air in the living room takes up all the space and sucks the sound from the house, so I will retreat somewhere else, maybe under a roof, maybe under stars where I can imagine people who once laid next to me under this sky, looking at these stars. I will try not to let you pull me to the ground; I will lay on it of my own accord, with dry eyes and a rested soul. I will not worry about how little I might seem, how unimportant you make me. I will tell myself it's a misconception, that your vision is going and you clearly can't fathom how much power resides in me, or just how much I could offer. These things I repeat to myself on a nightly basis while I scoop a tea bag out of a mug, so I can take them in with the steaming drink and swallow them, and hope this way they will stay with me. As long as I hold them, as long as I know them to be true, there is still hope.
What we can say with no words is astounding to me sometimes. What you don't say to me when I walk in the door, when I wake up and pass you in the hall, when we go about our everyday tasks in silence. What you say to one another when I am the space in between. It leaves me clamouring for something more, maybe something I had before, but certainly nothing people say to each other with words. And it's difficult to do so without them.
The back of your head tells me you think I rob you of time. Your short words ensure I know what I'm worth to you. Your terse air in the living room takes up all the space and sucks the sound from the house, so I will retreat somewhere else, maybe under a roof, maybe under stars where I can imagine people who once laid next to me under this sky, looking at these stars. I will try not to let you pull me to the ground; I will lay on it of my own accord, with dry eyes and a rested soul. I will not worry about how little I might seem, how unimportant you make me. I will tell myself it's a misconception, that your vision is going and you clearly can't fathom how much power resides in me, or just how much I could offer. These things I repeat to myself on a nightly basis while I scoop a tea bag out of a mug, so I can take them in with the steaming drink and swallow them, and hope this way they will stay with me. As long as I hold them, as long as I know them to be true, there is still hope.