An Unfortunate Silence

My feet gather dust and specs of repressed stress and dread that have been left behind, but never fully forgotten. Sludge mixed from dissatisfaction and abandoned dreams decorates my shoes as I make my way along the incline.

Everything shines and sparkles red above me, as the sun painfully glitters over the expensive rooftops and into my eyes, searing my cheeks and extracting my worth. I can’t shake the image of a blinding blood-red light, swirling around atop an  ambulance. The assaulting spotlight spins away, like that of a light-house, before smacking me straight in the eye and straight in the chest again. And oh, it never fails.

There are no longer any shoes on my feet, even dusty or tarnished ones, for they have taken those from me. Not out of greed, but by nature. Sometimes I think they may not even realize they’ve taken anything, or maybe they convince themselves of anything opposing that preposterous idea. They’ve become accustomed to stripping me of my dignity and my free thought, and so it is a daily an uneventful process now. For me, though, it is always as devastating as the very first time in which I was told that no one would care for me, and the things I have to say were barely worthy of being called thoughts. Titles and names and misnomers and blame.

I’ve been told time and time again that words are just words, but I will never succumb to that kind of misanthropic belief, no matter how much I distrust anyone but myself.

I’ve been told time and time again that words are so much more than words, that they will move mountains and change tides, and even more, change minds. This belief I want very much to succumb to. To wade underneath the weepy waters of my contentment and believe that one day I will find the words I need and I will learn to craft them in such a way that I may even change mountains and move tides, and at least get someone out there to think.

This belief may be all I have to hold my fragments together while the shiners of the overwhelming and painful red light speak. Wrapping a decrepit hand around my throat, the filed nails at the end of bony gray fingers trace my pulse ceaselessly. It feels as if there is something much thicker than saliva lining my throat, as leaning my chin away from the anxious fingers forces me to stick my nose in the air. Words are woven yet again into sentences, and the dark words overpower both the amount of oxygen in the room, and me as I feel them snake around my neck. They strive to cover every inch of my throat that is not already repressed by a decrepit finger or nail.

My breathing is jagged, less from pressure, and more from the nerves associated with the possibility of pressure. It is for my own good, the owner of this hand tells me. It is for my future. It is for the children I will not have, and it is for the religion I do not practice.

Grime and soot gather in the ventricles of my heart, and any semblance of a coherent language has vanished. I have dyslexia of the brain, and my thoughts have become alphabet soup. Luckily the grime has confined itself to the single and all-important organ that is said to regulate me. Though I never feel regulated. Never regular. It is burdensome to have compassion clouded and blackened, to have hope concealed by hatred, but it is so much safer to keep my despondency there, in a guarded piece of me. At least it has not peeled itself away from the walls of my heart, at least it has not been pumped through my viens and spread, vessel by vessel, vein by vein, organ by organ. At least it refuses to metastisize. At least it has not been shared.

At least there can still be those in the world who have hearts free of soot, pupils liberated from blinding assault, and throats free of constricting hands. There are those who can love openly, see clearly, and breathe freely, and for that, I can and I shall endure a blackened body, a stifling assault, a racing conscious, and an unfortunate silence.


2012