silence.

I feel like the unspoken words are the ones that matter the most. They change the course of a conversation for more than any postulation or carefully calculated compliment. Every truth you keep inside yourself is like a little burden, a little piece of misshapen weight that threatens to throw off your mind's timid balance.

There are so many things I have never told you... I felt my depth sinking into the ground I walk upon, slowing me down, holding me back. I long to be shallow again and walk with light feet upon bright cool grass, like a child running with no destination. For now I'm destitute, incomplete, heavy. My smiles are brief and only extend to my facial expression. There is so much to say, and no way to say it. I have very little time left with you, we have had very little time in the past. Time is of the essence, since there is no way of capturing it or getting it back once it has been lost. Time is invisible and yet is the governing force behind all human emotions. Fear of time, lack of time. Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

There are so many things you couldn't possibly know, so many feelings with no audible counterpart for them to be siphoned off through swift movement of the tongue and jaw... so many subtle gestures, fleeting glances, forgotten quakes of emotion, threatening at any point to throw me over the edge. There is so much I must tell you, so many things you do not understand.

To this point there has been nothing to say I suppose. Our conversations have been brief, and repetitive, and lacking of any real substance. And now I'm leaving and I don't know if I'll return, and I feel the smiles of your youth silhouetted on my skin like a ghostly tattoo, ancient languages I can't hear, but I understand. Intimately, without thinking, as love or hate are so similar.

Don't you see? love needs hatred as its counterpart; without either, the other could not possibly exist. Fire and water, negative and positive... Thoughts run together like salty sweet tears down your cheek, to my fingertip, to the back of that old shirt that's now been discarded, thrown in the back of your closet with the small dusty shoes and love letters from men whose names you've forgotten.

What else is there, besides the unspoken? What can I ever really tell you, that matters, when all you need to know is in that forgotten teardrop I wiped from your face, in the coagulated blood mess I washed from my skin, in the perfumed sweat of summer, chilled to a naked truthful reality by the shy autumn...

There is so much I could never tell you...