Silence

It was a macabre snow globe. A moment frozen in time and painted still, encapsulated in cheap plastic and sealed with broken memories. The universe had the common sense to turn off the colors that day and everything would be commemorated in various shades of gray and black and white for the rest of time. There was no color in the sky or in people’s cheeks. All blood fell silenced in people’s veins and retreated from their skin and into the depths of their cavernous chests.Their eyes were wet and swollen, their voices silenced. Their clothes were thick and the color of dead coal in a snowman’s eyes. A collection of icy, faded statues. No birds in the trees. No cars on the streets. Just the figurines gathered around a hole in the ground with a mother kneeling in the snow and a father lost in his grief.

The casket was simple. It was an elongated box for the remains of a stretched out human with the thread of life cut too short. While marveling at this unusually shiny thread, the fates had dropped their sharpened shears and prematurely snipped it In the broken gathering one thing stood out of place: the casket. The wood was still shiny, perfect. The screws were tight and the seal was new. The box held flowers as if on a shelf, suspended over the hole it would rest in. The ground was frozen solid, a sign that even the earth had no interest in housing this box. That even the soil that was meant to be warm and receiving had its reservations about the justness of accepting this one into its arms.

They were suspended in time and in space with no end in sight. The wind avoided the congregation out of respect but howled like a wounded animal in every corner it could find. It rustled potted plants and rattled naked branches into a symphony of aggravated desperation. It was the kind of howl authors write about in winter scenes, a violent hymn to which hearts would break. But hearts had been broken. And the wind, the almighty power, stopped in its tracks when the sky cried frozen tears onto the scene, the ground finally being forced to receive its untimely present. It was almost peaceful. It would have been peaceful if they hadn’t buried the last symbol of peace in their lives but they all stood frozen like photographs.

He wasn’t coming back and all of the crying, the kicking, and screaming wouldn’t change that. Liters of blood sacrificed to the gods, deals with the devils, the begging of reapers would be met with silence or laughter. There was nothing appealing enough to barter for him. And she had been ready to barter. A thousand souls in exchange for one was a price she would be willing to pay not once, not twice, but a thousandfold. It would be too small of a price for him. The moon in the sky would be a great sacrifice and even selling the sun and plunging the world into darkness was reasonable. Prayers and bargains fell on deaf ears.

She knew he wasn’t coming back. She knew but she didn’t listen or care. She would have prostituted her soul to the highest bidder for the chance of one more day with him. One moment frozen in time where she could blurt out all of the things that she needed to say. Things were not over, they were not neatly tied up with a bow and presented at the foot of a frozen grave. She had more words to tell him. She had things she wanted to show, things only he would understand in the world, things that would now dust and die in some corner of an unhappy mind. What would happen with all of the words she needed to tell him? What would happen to all of the letters written in tears and in blood on her skin? How would he know?

And he needed to know. It was imperative that he did. He needed to know what was hidden behind the cobwebs within the crevices of her mind because he would be the only one to understand. Whatever silence stretched between them was gone in an instant as if it had never existed, banished from between them with one word or one look. He needed to know. She needed him to know who she was, to admit he was proud or concerned or excited for her as she was for him and of him and with him.

She needed to know how she was expected to rebuild a foundation that cracked and turned into sand once he was gone. And she had known. She knew the moment it happened, if people could know such things. She could feel it course through her body and became overwhelmed at the sorrow flowing through her veins. She had been cold in a way that seeped in her bones, froze her bone marrow and would never let go. A cold that hurt deep in her soul.

Some days she nearly crawled in his grave, she would have laid on top of that mound of dirt listening for a heartbeat other than her own. The images were the worst. Seeing in her mind’s eye the stages of decomposition and accounting for the weather in each situation tore her remaining sanity into ribbons; blood soaked ribbons that would wrap around her wrists and try dragging her into the same hole he has been placed in. It seemed almost just to lay down her arms in the spot where he was or had been but she knew he wasn’t there. That the boy that once lived had long since disappeared and in his delicate place his innocence was replaced with a stranger.

She watched, a silent third party to the scene before her, the changing of the seasons, the tremors in her veins giving way to dismay, things that once were begging to return to their origins. Nothing would be the same ever again. Nothing would rebuild her from the ground up like he had. Nothing and no one would replace or fill the gaping hole in her soul. He was gone. Nothing she wanted or begged for would be returned to her. This was the new normal.

She would have given anything to lay with him again, staring at the shapes in the clouds, together on the same bench. She would have paid anything to be back in the living room with him in arms reach, the comforting lift of his chin and his lips. She would have done anything to feel him again, the warmth of his skin and the sound of his voice on her cheek. She’d become anything to close the 6,587 miles between them and hold him against her once more, protect him like the promise she’d sworn and maybe save him from the dance they’d been in.

10,600 km stretched between them. 6,587 miles between her and what her soul kept held tight like a treasure inside. First, centimeters, then miles and hundreds of meters, then thousands of light years now turned into silence and tears.