Silence boils and festers.
The words tangle and sputter. The thoughts, plans, dreams they sought to convey become clouded and muddy.
Thought breaks down, leaving feeling without explanation. Old hurts, hopes, and chances fade into uncertain echoes, their names forgotten.
…
I don’t want to go back.
I don’t want to talk to him, I don’t want to see her. It seemed like a good idea - take a vacation, see the old friends, indulge in some nostalgia and forget about serious adult life for a little while.
I forgot that going back also means remembering.
I take for granted how different the distance made everything. Like how everything from before I moved out here feels fuzzy and faded. How everything feels unreal, a story that happened but maybe not to me.
I don’t want to be reminded of what I left behind. I don’t want to be robbed of my illusions, to go back and find out nothing’s changed.
But it’s not the places, not really. It’s the people who keep you bound to the past. The people who were the past, because everything else is just scenery, after all.
…
I could walk away. I could cut them from my life. It’s not like it’d be especially difficult.
The funny thing is, the thing stopping me isn’t any great affection or fondness.
No, it’s this muddy feeling of irresolution. The unease that grows out of years of questions expecting answers, of the picture you had of your life growing up and where these people were supposed to end up with you. Why they didn’t, what went wrong, and finally, what’s going to happen.
Really, it’s the silence, an uncollected debt, demanding some kind of satisfaction.
I know what I want from her. I just want her to admit she cheated on me. I want her to acknowledge what she did, instead of the endless deflections and excuses, the denials and false equivalencies. Not out of spite, or a need to be avenged. Not because I want to see atone. No, it’s long past time for any of those things. That kind of closure was never hers to grant, I’ve long since realized.
No, just because it seems absurd, unreal, impossible that something so deeply scored into the marrow of my life should be so distant from her, whose was the hand that cut it into me. Her endless cry is “I don’t remember.” and I can’t stand it, can’t accept it.
Something hides behind the walls of her silence, and I just want to know what it is.
…
And him.
Once upon a time we were going to save the world together. Once we were young and had the world ahead of us and he was the person at my side who had my back.
And gradually I realized we were strangers, and that where I went he couldn’t follow. I watched him suffer and struggle and rot in the shadow of our home town from far away.
Silence stood between us, and as well as I know him, as easy as it is to watch the patterns and anticipate his next self-sabotage, I still can’t understand him. I still don’t know where his crooked path leads. I don’t know if the friend I thought I had was ever anywhere in there.
I think I need to know if this is all there is to him, or if there’s more. If he can survive himself, if he can make it.
Really: if it’s time to give up, or not.
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