Saturday, November 19, 2005

No more I love yous

Words like dust float in the air, unseen, unspoken. You will never hear them now and I have not spoken them in time; they will only float until they fall, unnoticed, pushed under the cabinet or the bed you lie on. Gathering there in time as other patients come in, collecting into dust-bunny piles of unsaid worthless sounds. Only, silent: if no one is alive to hear the tardy words fall, do they make a sound? No one else will see the words I couldn’t say, the ones you needed to hear but didn’t. The janitor will sweep them away with the rest of the detritus of a life at the end, my failures winding up where they deserved. So much rubbish.

Did you have words for me that mingled in the light, tangling like atoms invisible to our eyes, inaudible to our ears? Could the ending have been better if we’d spoken it aloud? The I love yous and the I need yous lighting a path for you to follow, easing the heartache and the loneliness and fear. You were so brave in the face of silence. Words should be a balm, not dust bunnies under a hospital bed, left there undiscovered and unheard, carted away with the body.