I can hear everything you aren’t saying

I can hear everything you aren’t saying.  I hear it for you and I hear it for me.  I hear it in my head, I taste it in my mouth.  I swallow it whole.  I choke on it like pride long over due and then dead.

I hear it thick like the lie it is and softly like the truth it contains.  I hear it screaming like a banshee and softly like twigs, breaking fragile under my feet as I walk through the darkness of reality, towards the light, holding hands with who we are and who we were…fighting off who we aren’t with the fire that burns within all that you aren’t saying.

I can hear everything you aren’t saying.  I hear it in everything we’ve never done, in all of the things done ‘almost perfect’. I can hear it within the accidents of things done perfectly, without our even trying.  I can hear it singing softly on the waters of rivers in canyons, mightily on the wings of birds majestic, that have flown above us, ahead of us, below us…signifying our fall into the silence of hands intertwined, always moving, but never holding.  I can hear what was never said in the way we never held onto things, including each other.

I can hear you clearly, though you never speak a word of what needs to be heard at all.  I can hear you in the things you say- things that seem so mundane in subject but so thick in context.  I can hear you in a simple sentence that tells a story ten volumes long…I can hear a moment contained within a life of things unspoken.  I can hear you behind the walls of your heart and the circumstances of your life…the things you whisper and the things your soul screams.

I can hear everything you aren’t saying, with bent ears and a broken heart.  With crushed lungs too heavy with sludge to breathe another deep breath, gasping deep inside of myself for the air that is thick with those things you leave unspoken.  I can hear your silence reverberating within my chest, bouncing off the chambers of my heart, so heavy, so slow, so within what you don’t say, so heavy with what you should.

I can hear you softly as you hold your own breath, loudly like a clanging church bell when the sun finally sets in your eyes and sleep graciously embraces you into a dream…a dream where at last you can finally hear yourself and all of the things you  never say…A dream that sets you free from all that is before and yet to come.  Of what was and what could be if only…a dream that allows you to rest within what, at long last, is.

I can hear everything you aren’t saying.  I can hear you from the mountain tops and the valleys of my own existence.  I can hear you and interpret you.  Translate you and convey you.  I can speak you.  You are my second language and all that you do not say, all that I can hear withholding, is my first.