Words left unsaid
He had walked out a month ago, but still had his keys. The keys to the home they built together, the one that would house their common dreams.
They hadn’t spoken since.
She didn’t know what he was doing, where he was, what he worked on, how he was feeling. She only had her viewpoint. And that was biased.
It was pitch black outside when she got up. Even the lights had all been turned off. It was the usual hour she felt forced out of bed, too tormented by nightmares to remain lying there trying to sleep.
She took a pen and paper, rarely nowadays abandoning her keyboard, and this meant it was too important to type. It had to be handwritten to reflect the emotion it contained.
“At night, when I can’t sleep, I write to you. Letters, I’ll never send and you’ll probably never read. But it helps me calm down during the nights I’m tortured by the thoughts in my head. When the chaos inside me overwhelms and devours me. I write to tell you what you can’t seem to hear from me. I write in an effort to make you understand. To make you see that even a dragon hides a frightened mouse inside. That sometimes all you need is the reassurance and certainty of having someone next to you at all times, no matter what and above everything and everyone else. I thought that was you. Not to heal me. You wouldn’t do that. But to help me heal myself. Love won’t heal wounds. The feeling of safety and being loved no matter what, who and when, is what makes a person stronger. What helps them heal themselves.
You were supposed to stick around for the hard times too, not just the good ones.
We were supposed to grow stronger together, to grow with each other, helping one another to develop into the best person they can be. We were supposed to form a unit as one – a force to reckon with, a single corps against the world. We were supposed to be ‘us’. A power couple. We were supposed to be allies to one another. Not to demolish each other, ripping ourselves apart from the inside. We were supposed to close each other’s scars, not create new ones.
Yet despite everything – all the words said, all the actions done (or not) – I still wait for you. In the sounds of daily life, in the phone calls that ring, the doors that knock, I longingly hope it will be you. I see you in every single thing that reminds me of you. I still hope you’ll come into my darkness and turn on the light. The light that faded and is now lost. My light that I allowed to be extinguished.
Yet you never do.
That itself should be a sign. Just like all those things we didn’t do: the trips we never went on, the plans we never followed through. All signs. An answer to all the ‘whys’ that won’t let my mind rest.
Yet I still wait. Hoping even now for something to change. Because hope is all we have left.”
In the morning, she booked a plane ticket and left. That same afternoon, he used his keys again.
When you start counting your past in two-digit numbered-years, you know you’ve lived a lot. But you never cease to be amazed by how rapidly time really rushes by. It’s only when you think of what has been that you begin to realise the magnitude of the things you’ve experienced and all the things you’ve managed to do and survive. Yet you’ll always sadden at the thought that many of those things and people that accompanied you in your earlier years don’t exist anymore. And you tremble at the frightening thought that the same fate awaits you sometime in your future. All you can hope is that it will be far away.
MC's Whispers 