We Have Conversations Without Speaking
I remember my head on my pillow and yours on your own. I remember morning light coming through the windows and highlighting every freckle, every line, your eyelashes, your hair, the specks in your eyes. I remember staring at each other, our faces no more than a foot apart, and laughing in an otherwise silent world about nothing at all. Smiling and staring. Staring and smiling. And laughing. One moment, or thousands of little moments, who knows? A smile. A laugh. A kiss. And then… “Good morning.” But we’d already spoken a million scripts, a thousand dialogues, every one of Shakespeare’s plays. There was so much said before “Good morning.”
We had conversations without speaking.
One of my best friends and I went out the other night and boy, when you get us together there is hardly a second without a word said, whispered, screamed. To an outsider we would sound like teenage girls again, though both of us are twenty four. We can gush about anything over cocktails, during the commercials of our favorite shows, or in the car on our way to dinner. We can have serious, long discussions or we can throw random one liners at each other and spend the next ten minutes laughing until our stomachs hurt. But somewhere in all that talking, all those sounds and syllables, there is an underlying thread that pulls everything together and makes sense of our crazy babble. In one sentence I can baffle the world and she will understand that it is not completely random that I suddenly want Gelato at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, even though I just ate way too much theater popcorn and half a second ago we were talking about something completely unrelated.
We can have conversations without speaking.
We no longer see each other, nor do we speak. We are, essentially, cut off and out of touch. We feel as separated as you possibly can feel in a situation like ours. It is unnatural and bizarre and continues to make no sense to me from day to day but there are so many things to overcome and right now the mountain is just far too high and we are both far too unprepared to make the climb. In the meantime we keep a foothold, a small piece of reassurance that the other is still on the opposite side. There is a mountain between us but sometimes I feel like it is only seconds since we talked last.
We have conversations without speaking.
I still cry ever now and then. I get choked up on a sunny day on my way to work and I turn up the volume and drown out my own thoughts. I see your picture on my dresser and I try hard not to look too long and refocus my mind somewhere else. I avoid saying your name in conversation because I don’t like the sound of myself saying it. But there are moments when you sneak up on me. You catch me off guard and you come in, causally sit down and make yourself comfortable in my mind. You strike up a casual conversation and you make me laugh before I have the time to realize you’re there and shake it off. It’s usually in a quiet place, like when I’m in the river gathering stones to place on the bank, or trying to read a book in the silence of my room at the end of a long day. By the time I notice your presence, you’ve made yourself comfortable and will be too stubborn to leave so eventually I give in and I talk back. In these moments you calm me, remind me that you’re never really gone, and bring me a little closer to acceptance. Even if acceptance is a destination I will never reach.
We will always have conversations without speaking.
Some of the most important and meaningful conversations I’ve ever had were spoken without words.
Learn to Be Still 