Our words are lies. They twist around us like serpents, constricting our chests and clouding our thoughts with disorder. The addictive poison of fallacy drips from guarded lips, lips that had once been so open and receptive to each other. We stretch and squander the moments no longer made to hold us, darting and flitting through the consequences of time. Even though I cannot dance, I now swing to the song of avoidance. With clumsy feet, I expertly sway across this familiar floor. I have become more intimate with evasion than with her skin and lips and restless tongue.
Confusion seems to be the reoccurring theme as we find ourselves once more placed at a familiar crossroad, the two paths sprawled before us like lounging beasts. Those animals crouch in anticipation of our division, just waiting to swallow us up and withhold us from returning to the comfort of the same circular roads and congruent results.
The tension is tangible, even when the safety of distance prevents the commodity of heated glances and nervous stares. Only voices connect through the silence that is as heavy as night--that overwhelms the chirp of spring crickets and the roar of empty sound--lips pressed to the metal of phones as words are shared, tongues faltering over failing truths and spreading lies. Lies, lies, lies. They scream through the resounding quiet, polluting my thoughts. They surround me, as empty as her hollow laughter that I now hear ringing in my ear. I used to join in with that irresistible display of humor when it hadn't been so hollow, when it had been brimming with ecstasy and shivers of joy, my own laughter unable to deny it company. Now I am confounded by it, my own lips bound and pressed in the grasp of perplexity as I wait for the silence that will surely follow. The resonant quiet comes, a vicious reminder of how graceless our pauses have become, weighted with unease where before they had housed security and comfort.
The beasts slide tongues across waiting lips as I falter through that diseased intermission, finally cracking beneath its weight. Then, my misguided lips are parting, shattering the indelicate glass of our silence with the slander of my tongue.
"Do you still love me?"
I don't know and I hate myself for not knowing, not knowing the answer to the question that has just escaped amidst a volley of deceit, born from my lips to end this frittering jig of indecision. A question so revealing that it will expose our scars and currently festering wounds. A question that might kill us. I feel as if I have just written a sloppy two paragraph conclusion to end an overrated and predictable five hundred page novel. The story could have been much better--that is, if only the author had cared at all about the book's characters and their conflict. That author's pen was as careless as my words are now, careless as my truths that can no longer be cloaked with the falsity of manufactured laughter and acceptance of the pain tugging at my heart.
Those words are met with silence, because the person on the other end of the phone line would rather duck her head in lies than face my verity, would rather continue dribbling through contrived feelings and false attention. And I would rather continue shoving unfitting words inside a five hundred page useless novel that needs a conclusion--that needs to be over--because I, too, am more comfortable when lounging amongst liars. Through and through my veins bleed of deception, even if vulnerable words pushed forth from reluctant lips only moments ago touched upon a truth that I now don't want to hear, don't ever want to hear. Because she's giving me the answer after an excruciating suspension of sound, she's handing it to me through a breath of air that I never want to breathe.
An answer that is truth.
An answer that is painful.
Because this traitorous contradiction that's coming might just be the same one beating in my own bewildered heart.
"I don't know anymore."
And now I'm longing for the lies, I'm thirsting for the poison of her voice and my misconceptions, embraced in the folds of bewilderment. I want to slip back inside our old childhood bed--a bed that is now too small to hold our adult bodies. But its too late. The delicate cobweb of our lies has been brushed aside with a simple slew of words. Now not just uncertainty clings to our floundering and defeated tongues, but fear, because I can feel this slipping away, I can feel her fading and growing bored with my defective novel. And as more truths begin to tumble from our mouths at the splintering of the dam, fear is all I feel--fear and the growing pit of sadness where all our memories lie. What I have started, I cannot stop. The toxicity runs too deep. As we tumble through the patterns of separation, tripping and careening toward an abrupt ending on the wheels of our truths, the disconnect occurs. The single phone line full of knots and ties that bound us together is severed, and I'm feeling the clench of eager jaws around my neck. I feel the ring once wrapped warmly around the finger on my left hand slip bitterly from its residence. I hear the silence pounding in my eardrums, betraying the whir of bedroom lights and the noises of night that are not contained behind my glass windows. I feel the knowing smirks of those two beasts as they approach, taking us with their gloating teeth, holding us where words can no longer reach and skin can no longer brush.
In a single motion, I have been swallowed, and so has she.