She walked into the café and all the twilight strangers felt an enormous sadness enter the room. A heaviness they knew came from the outside, unmistakably not their own. It had a universal quality, the final disillusionment of human hoping, and so it resonated, yes, but it was not their day to enter the existential vacuum. Their thoughts thick but fragile like the froth in their cups, they raised their eyes and met each other in the air, sympathetic, searching, building walls around themselves. One by one they saw her, she removed her hat, her sunglasses, and they found her eyes, the deepest of wells, red and blue, puffy and determined to hold on to reality. She found a table and sat down carefully, overly conscious, overly composed. She saw only what she needed to. The chair to ha,ng her coat on, the bench for her bag, the spilled sugar on her table to brush to the floor, replace with her computer, the 'on' button, the blank page and the keys. A quick breath and she started to type. The twilight strangers had forgotten about her already. Their thoughts had turned to themselves. And this is how it is, she knew. In cafes. In love. It was 12.20 a.m. and she was hungry. She’d just finish this sentence and have a look at the menu, which the waitress had placed behind her computer while she typed and without her noticing.
Repeat Into Silence is the story that she wrote...
Repeat Into Silence
He looks at me with his love-brown eyes. A straight face at first, his eyes in deep conversation with mine, we're saying everything we have always said, and how it will be forever that these words exist between us.
And then a quick smile dawns over his cheeks, and mine follow like a wave that flows from his heart to mine. And there's nothing that I can say, except for "marry me." And nothing that he can say, except for "no." Except that he could say "just tell me why," and I could say, "because my world will not have it so."
And there's nothing more I can explain, and a void opens up inside me and slips its shadow over all the love that drowns in me every day, as if it did not die yesterday too, and as if I do not die in his presence, and in his absence, and in my solitude since I left him behind to find a road that does not open before me.
"There's nothing more I have ever wanted and nothing I have been able to want since," my wounded truth sends into his almost closed believing.
"But yet," he says, "you cannot choose me to love every morning and all the following day?"
"I have chosen it," I say a thousand times.
"But you cannot do it in this life, in our real life, outside of your heart, outside of your poems?"
"I cannot," I do not say but say nothing meaning the same.
"And you cannot explain why," he says not even asking.
"I cannot" I repeat into the same silence, a place that once roared with my voice and my excuses and my begging for forgiveness and chances, a place we eventually evacuated and that I now carry with me everywhere, making me as meek and barren as the smoldering hope in the ambers of these daydreams.
"Then," he says, "we will be always apart and never together, and you will always be alone and I will soon pull the shroud over your impossible presence in my life, which will be rewritten without you."
Frozen and buzzing I turn from these ghosts in the empty seat before me, and I do not know whether to breathe again, or how to live, except for in these imaginary conversation between you and me, in this café and so many others, full of people living their lives while I make up stories so I can still feel you in mine.
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