Something Can Be Made of Silence

For him, my place was not familiar. It did not even seem like something he may have known, nor something he could try to remember. His being here (where I presently am) was the first time, of many times, I instinctively hoped. Although, I must make your aware, how instinct races beneath the conscious, and therefore, this hope could not be separated from the blood it is mixed in and which keeps me alive, pursuing life. Does that mean it means more or matters most when I figure who it is I am? You must understand, that not even I was aware of what I wanted then. It is only now, that I have begun to see myself acting and think of why I chose to be that certain character I was being. Now let us go there, September seventh, the fall of my final year. 

I imagine not far beyond reason. And I tell you this, expecting you can now trust me and believe my mind was seeing realms of possible realities, confirmed likely by logic. So there he is, I imagine, enclosed in that uncomfortable space that elevators are consistently in the presence of. 

Do you ever wonder how that it is? That every time you treat yourself to an elevator ride, kindly giving your legs a rest break, you become more preoccupied with what a nuisance your body is, just standing there soliciting nothing usable—skin and smell, oh and that god awful sight of yourself that you would rather not be associated with. Are people staring at you or their own hopeless figure frozen in quietude and mirrored between the frame of the sliding door? How we wish we would remember to take the stairs, instead of subjecting ourselves to otherness. But how dependable we are of falling victim to our games of self-consciousness—always purposefully forgetting there are routes for avoiding human contact, that awkward tension when we do not know if our want is another’s want. Perhaps, we are unwilling to travel the distance taken by the unanimous. It could be that, unlike “them”—the nameless, faceless, beings of nonbeing—we want to be seen and consumed, a want that wills us into sharing space, even though we would rather cease to exist during that elevator ride, than continue feeling like we stand alone in the presence of one or many.

He stepped onto the carpeted hallway of the seventh floor. His body two doors down from where I eat, sleep and try to live. Breathing six floors of air out, while the elevator continued its advancement in spite of him, he thought now in the absence of others, That was not so bad. And in reality, it hadn’t been, but it takes a moment after the moment being reflected on to feel how weightless affects are. Moments tick in time, and we forget the moment we were in, or at the very least, the majority of what we were thinking mattered. 

I answer his knock by opening the door and pulling him closer into the space I have tried to make reflect my present being. Everything goes spilling forth into his eyes: my face aged by the three years of our absence, the apartment’s scent like my very own second skin and my voice which speaks for my presence but, also, reminds him of the distance between now and then. A distance consumed by darkness that eventually comes to light, which at that point is where it stops and some place other starts. A distance that spans time, a time made valuable not by sight but by the resonance of speech, where my absent voice sings a repetitious note of a time that ceased being, the collection of moments before the second I said, “We are over”. Ah, but now I must see that my language had no strength and my voice did not keep its reason, for he is back and it is all because of me. 

“You came!” I say inside his embrace, but I know I felt nothing, not even warmth as his body pushed through mine. He holds a glass I had given him moments into his arrival, and through it I can see his hand trembling. With a gesture of immediacy, I pour in wine so a substance thick with color can fill the transparency of our unsettling engagement. It is obvious we share a similar unknowingness of the reason we are together again, and so I comment on the weather. Yet, in a rush to avoid either of our interiors, I forget how meaningless exteriors are. “It has been one of my favorite types of day,” I reveal with a confidence that seems removed from myself, almost like I am impersonating someone I think I should be. Overcast, he laughs not sure if he should. You have always been so facetious! I feel as if I am standing in the same situation I had left us in—small, supercilious, like his presence is inspired by the need to teach me how to think. “Overcast is a fine way to be,” I answer, this time taking total control of myself. 

I notice there is nothing to be said, which makes me think how the perfect silence would be perfect to have, to find, to create. He speaks immediately after my thought, just as I expect he will, since he always had—an effort that succeeds at being just as successful at refraining from having to hear me, and wanting to listen to me. Aren’t you going to introduce me? No one knows who he is and lets face it, we are in Manhattan, no one cares either. We do not exist unless we have a name. Not true, I think of many I have only seen but never formally met. Well, I must have a name if I have been talked about. “Who says I have told anyone about you?” What’s got you? He looks at me like he is looking at someone I have never been. The weather? I am only being playful. “It comes with the territory.” Well, I’m a guest. “And you have never been playful.” Hey—he makes my voice turn silent, my words lose their meaning—I love you. Spaces come between his words, so it sounds like he has intentionally hinted toward fragments of being—nouns without purpose. 

Hours lost their importance, as the night owned us both. I became drunk because it was the only emotion I found available in my apartment. The only emotion I wanted to indulge in; something separate from myself, I could blame my behavior on, if need be. Within this place of mind, our breaking up seemed to loose its’ meaning, and it was as if the only thing that had any life was our bodies approval of the other. 

I fought nothing. I was so over it: the act of being between a barrier, the art of caring. If my mind had been present I am sure it would have responded just as my body had—logically, conveniently—judging off of facts, “My body has slept in his before, there is no mistaking, a heart can only experience what it has not known.” 

And so I felt nothing of it, when he bent my body in two—taking advantage of its halves. Mouths upon the others gaping hole, darkness tongues can go exploring through. The moment between a beating heart, I waited for his tongue to move, to trace circles of hope inside my mouth, to charge my body with life. I waited for something I expected we all are responsible for, that we all can give, and found myself waiting for longer than I could before becoming weak.

His hand pressed into the muscle of my shoulder, while his other closed the lids of my sight and, prowling, wrapped around my neck, until I became tighter and tighter, my breath less and less. I went along with him, thinking I had to—pretending his perversity had never been a secret, like it was a direction my body knew by heart, as if it were the reason we came together. 

With my body shaped as an arch, I imagine he thought I appeared like the character for the role, like I was meant to be on my knees. I stare into the impossible sky, a canvas colored by nothingness, and think of the message he is telling me—a conversation between sexes—and wonder whether he is listening to me as my body speaks. Loud slaps against my ass, nothing similar to an applause, and I feel nothing of it. Not until now do I think how easy it is to go missing in the darkness, when the night owns us all; how easy it is to play your part, to pretend to be an expert at what you do not know because it is embarrassing not to know. And so I act like I have done what he needs a hundred times before, as if in silence we share the same gesture, that we depend upon the same wants and needs. 

On that bed—that bed which is mine—I respond as if it is his, feel like he does not talk to me because he does not know my name, that he will keep me only during this night and then I will have been had. But it is not until now that I can liken it to those elevator rides, the consistent hope they present you with for the moment when you can exit where you are and be where you had been waiting to be. That distance after the moment defined by profound silence, where you thought only to yourself despite the body beside you, where staring at you is some other you that you felt you were but did not want to know. The distance after he has come, where hovering over you is a body you have seen before, but with mouths holding in the silence, you feel you could never know. So you come to show something can be made of the silence, but it is not until the moment after speech that your secret is revealed to him: “I hadn’t a name to say because I never knew you so you would exist.