You’re asleep in bed right now, your rumpled t-shirt damp with sweat, and glancing over at you I feel as if it has been years since the silence began. Silence never bothered me before The Accident, but now it’s like a growing, breathing, vital ..thing, that navigates into the empty, vulnerable places, and has chosen to habitate in the space between us. It is like the anger and frustration that we never suspected was within us, has become without us, and is an elephant in the room that we refuse to address. But it’s not going away, and as salient and succinct as these thoughts are on the paper that chirps decisively from my typewriter one-half inch at a time, I cannot seem to expel them to you in such a way that is easy or comfortable for you to swallow. This was all your fault, I want to say calmly, damning you to guilt and remorse. But the words never come. And lurking almost silently behind my will to lay all of the blame on you is a rigid and ugly fear that you feel I am the one responsible, culpable, for all this mess. And so I remain defiantly silent, wallowing in my grief and so afraid of where this story is going that I refuse to let anything be written. I remain stagnant, unchanging, unable even to choose between Dim Sum or General Tso for my Friday night takeout. It matters little because I will eat it alone in my office, surrounded by the cold comfort of stacks of paper, reels of typewriter tape, and the stacks upon stacks that you used to tease me about never getting around to reading. It won’t matter what I order because I don’t taste it anymore, I just cleave to the routine out of fear of anything else becoming different, unexpected, too hard for me. The sadness in this flat is so palpable that neither of us can barely stand it, but out of fear of accepting the inevitable and confronting what the future no longer holds for us, we both continue to tiptoe around what will gradually become our reality. Without turning, I hear your movements and know that you are turning over, your splayed limbs wound into the tangled sheets, your sleeping sounds betraying your private dreams. We both dream of The Accident unfailingly, unceasingly, incessantly. We soothe one another when we wake up crying or screaming, and in the morning, we pass one another in the hall like nothing happened, our unwillingness to console each other in the bright light of morning is as palpable as the drip of the faucet down the hall. Sometimes when you’re down in your studio, painting your sorrow relentlessly into a canvas of blues and grays and greens, layer upon layer of resentment and longing, I crack the door to Her Room, and I wonder if you sometimes do the same. Do you stand in her doorway like I do, afraid to venture in for fear that reality will come down crushingly and you will no longer be able to keep it together? I keep her locket in my office, in the top left drawer, underneath a stack of unfinished novel beginnings, and in the depths of the night when the coffee has failed me and my ideas just run together, I gingerly pick it up and turn it over in my hand. She was not the glue that held us together. We were Us before she came about, but how to come together again since The Accident has eluded us. I remember longing for a full night’s sleep, kept just a reach away by the night-time awakenings for a glass of water, and now I lay awake wishing to hear that creaky board next to Her Door again, for normalcy and sameness and a promise of nothing being different. Yet you lay there so comfortable, so content with The Way Things Are. Unable or unwilling to grieve alongside me, drenched in acceptance as much as sweat from your nightmares, and I see so much of myself and what I refuse to acknowledge, and I think I hate you.
HW 01/25/13
High Definition Poetry 