The Other Side of the Stillness (Part II)

Our stillness ended; the gale came, rather than sailing through he hove to and rode it out, the gale passed; in the autumn afternoon’s lengthening shadows reaching from surrounding buildings and trees to engulf our little concrete patio of caffeine consumption, I heard him return their conversation to more casual, mundane things, remaining friendly and open; he set course for calmer, more known waters, where the shoals and rocks waiting just below the surface to stave hulls of reckless vessels are well charted and easily avoided. Again, we were three, though I doubt they ever knew we were one, though I doubt I will ever again not be them. I could no longer claim any understanding of her pauses, inflections, cadences, silences; I still cannot. I can no more assert that he narrowly averted disaster than that he came close to something beautiful (though I suspect the former). I can offer no recounting of the substance of the remainder of their conversation, for it had no substance, as it seems to me he prolonged it only to distance them both from whatever he might have been about to say. Their conversation, which had held me enraptured for what seemed longer than my entire life to that moment, now held me only with the anxiety that demands closure; I wanted to tune them out, ignore them, forget them, return to my reading, but I could not. Their voices were all I could hear, even after their conversation had run its course, even after they had said their farewells and walked off in separate directions, even after the cafe closed and the shadows engulfed the patio and the air turned cold, even after there was no longer enough light by which to read the pages which I still hold open to where I paused so very long ago. I sip my decaf americano, now no warmer than the air, I pour the rest into the bushes and take my leave, resigning the cup to the recycling and my book to my pocket, tightening around myself my coat and scarf against the night. The bus will come soon, but so will another after, and another after that, and I have no desire to return to the home that I know will feel alien and empty, so instead I turn my steps toward campus and follow myself wherever I do not know I wish to tread. Head bent towards the earth, hands thrust deep into my pockets, I follow myself through the shadows, voyaging from one island of yellow lamp light to the next, listening to wind-rustled leaves, sometimes passing someone and wondering if they are one of the two, sometimes passing two and wondering if they are phantoms of what might have been, sometimes hearing voices and straining to listen and straining to not hear and hoping they are the voices and hoping they are not, mostly wandering alone over paths of concrete and brick, across the occasional lawn, tracing a chaotic path that sometimes moves in straight lines, sometimes in zig-zags, sometimes in spirals, sometimes in circles, beneath trees, between buildings and sculptures, until concrete becomes asphalt and asphalt becomes dirt and rocks and I find myself again where I do so often, in the small forest behind campus, stepping onto the metal bridge spanning the narrow creek. In the murmur of water flowing over and around rocks and the sighs of the woods, I lean against the bridge bannister and try to forget myself. It does not work. It never does. Wherever I direct my mind, I find my self, and when I release my mind, it scampers away into the forest for a time, takes flight amidst the towering trunks, glides over and under and out of the water, finding everywhere more of itself, returning inevitably, unbidden, to its nest. I hope I never hear them again. I hope I never meet them, never have to know their faces or names or the shape of their bodies or how they like to dress or what becomes of them. Already they are lodged in me, splinters of a shattered silence that will never heal. Already they have changed me, and for that I hate them both, mostly him, for he drove us onward towards catastrophe he then delayed forever. I wish him no ill will; it will surely find him regardless of my desires. Here, surrounded by my selves that root in the soil and grow towards the sky and flow over and around the rocks and beneath the bridge that are also them, I decide I need to go home, I need to sleep, but I cannot leave this place until I understand one last thing, why he did it, what drove him on, I replay it all again and again, every repetition echoing out through my branches and leaves into the endless atmosphere that encompasses all those I am, that I cannot be, that I cannot not be, the air a part of myself ceaselessly seeking that which will never become.