I Heard Nothing.

I heard her say a thing, as if almost in a dream.

What is it you hear when you close  your eyes, my love?

I shut my eyes, desperately trying to answer her question. Through an avalanche of silky mist I searched, and in the hallowed caverns of a heart darkened by circumstance, and reborn through time, I find the answer.

I hear nothing.

I can sense her reaction through the space set between us, and I move lightly through the mystic channels of her pain. There are no drum beats to offer her, no raging fires by which I can warm her labored heart.

The rants begin, the once-shuttered wounds now on full display. She waves her angry finger in my direction, and points her injured mind like a laser at me. I make no attempt to dodge her searing light, and I bear its brunt with all of who I am.

Yet, I hear nothing.

Missing pieces of an ugly puzzle have now been found, and distorted images of a nasty jigsaw suddenly begin to fit. Memories, once discarded like empty refuse now seem to matter more than the air we once breathed, as seconds once forgotten now must align themselves to be counted.

Still, I hear nothing.

It seems I’ve been renamed a million times in the confines of a single sentence, and redefined eternally within the grasp of but one, angry thought. It seemed only a matter of time before the knives once thrown at her became weapons of her choosing. One-by-one she sliced, and one-by-one she’d use them all to find the single, sharpest blade. It seemed no wonder that even in her blindness, she never missed her target.

But, I heard nothing.

I could not look in her direction. I needed to remember her as she was before the battle took her away from me. I could not bear to see the Sun herself darkened, the Moon whittled away into nothing but a black hole within my heart. She had gone, from the greatest work of art into a child’s cartoon hastily painted on an outhouse wall.

Dammit, I heard nothing.

Finally, I forced my eyes open to gaze upon her brilliant Divinity. In the power of the moment I had forgotten how beautiful she was, and in the absence of my attention she had grown beyond my ability to grasp. I admired the way her hair flowed magically from her skin, and felt those eyes pierce through me in a way that destroyed every wall I had ever built, and leveled any obstacle I had placed between us.

Please, baby, tell me what you hear when you close  your eyes?

I heard nothing.  I searched for the knives she had used, but only found the one held tightly in my hand. I searched her for an outstretched finger, but could only find the one that I was pointing. I looked for her words, but only found the ones that were falling from my lips. It seemed everything that was, was in me.

“I hear everything,” I answered.

As she lit the middle candle I could see by the reflection on the wall that I had lost her. The darkness of my life was lit by nine, and the visions I had seen from her were nothing more than fantasies of my own design. I dreamt of having everything, and nothing, and here I was getting all I had ever wanted.

I reached for her empty hand, and embraced her gaze in my own. Then I let go, resolved to loving her more than she had been loved in her life.

“Goodbye,” was all that I could say. One word that said a million, one moment that brought eternity to life.

I heard nothing as I turned and walked away, and heard everything as each step brought me toward…