you come to me in waves
You come to me in waves:
The first is silence. You’re invisible. For a mistaken moment, I believe you are no longer there. I move on with my life and marvel at how smoothly life continues in your absence. The calmness is unexpected; it preoccupies me, seeding a question: perhaps you were not that big of a presence. Perhaps this is a sign. Perhaps this silence was sent to deliver a message, that you were nothing, after all.
The second is the silence, held longer, turned inwards, flipped inside-out, and turned outwards. It is loud. I realize, suddenly, that for the silence to be visible I must have looked at it. The silence was not silence all along. It was an excuse to think about you while feeling above the waves, when I was not. I was under the surface, looking at the sky refracted through the movement of the tides just above me. Suddenly the silence hurts, and I dare myself to look at photos of you. It takes me less than a minute to succumb: it is two in the morning and I have looked at every photo of your beaming smile, your nonchalance blurred in a momentary capture, your silhouette against the adventures we took. The silence is gone.
The third is melancholy. I wallow in the mistake of swimming in our past, because now the ocean is blue, so incredibly blue. Not a day goes by where I wonder what you are doing, suddenly afraid that the silence I first felt is the silence you are feeling now, of me, but more truly. Have you moved on? I want to know, but I cannot, and so I continue to wade in the viscosity of my sorrow. I am addicted to photos of you, though at the surface I tell myself that I am doing it because I have moved on. That is a lie. I have not.
The fourth is an unsettling peace. Eventually, the sorrow wears thin, and the ocean is blue but transparently so; I can look up at the sky, break the surface, breathe the air. Sometimes I am back underneath, but I know how to swim upwards. It feels like silence, but I am not sure it is the same as the one I first encountered. Suddenly, I realize that the ocean is vast, that I have been wading in place, and that maybe it is time to think about swimming towards something new.