I thought that which you do not remember is that which did not exist.
I did not know the silence has a voice of its own.
My naivety; your indifference. Memories lurking in dark recesses, battering against slippery glass walls. Guileless, my face, but my eyes betray the exhaustion of a five year war. Suppression? I think of it not; my subconscious workings continue unaided. But for how much longer?
A dark Odysseus, so were you to me. Your glib words, your constant leading me down dark paths, not even allowing breadcrumbs to fall from hopeful fingers. Even then, as now, I read your mind; still, you haunt me, although you are many miles away.
No matter how fast I bury you, your hand continues to break through the surface, grime covered and clutching at me. I do not have the heart to step back, nor the strength to let the spade fall with a hard finality. My arms grow tired from this constant shovelling. One day, I must stop.
Your laughter dismissed the words that flew from my mouth. No matter how many times I extended my hand to lead you from the shadow, you took it and led me deeper. At times my touch almost seemed to cause you phyical pain, but you endured it for reasons I could not, cannot, understand. Was it your patronising gift to me, or another motivation entirely?
I gazed into your eyes from under an ocean of your presence.
I drowned quietly and without complaint.
Observing from afar: your eyes following the light movements I made. My hand tracing the surface of the water, sending ripples downstream. No matter how many reverberations I left, they were swallowed in the disturbance of your thrown rocks. If you cannot step into the same stream twice, you were raging torrents, sweeping my youth away. Your river swallowed my trickling, silken stream.
My gaze dulled with time, like that of a caged panther. Could you not see I needed my ropes cut, my wings left unclipped, my enclosure torn down? I paced tirelessly as you silently watched, holding all the keys but moving nothing.
For my Debussy, you returned Rachmaninov; you leading me deeper, into a world of lapidary harmonies, resonating from the ground below my feet. Then, I was afraid of their power. Now I recognise that there are jewels undiscovered in the darkness, a beauty in the granite of your eyes. Were you asking me, even then, to shape grace from those hard chunks, hewn from your mysterious depths?
I did not realise in my innocence that the natural order of the world partners day with night.
I will meet you again in the transitions of dawn and dusk.
"And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream."
(From: "Time" by Tom Waits, Rain Dogs album) - thank you!
For izubachi, and for the third party.