Notes: Written for the Hush challenge over at leverageland. Uber angst to the nth degree. Title taken from "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
He has never been good with words.
He is good with poetry, music, art, books, motion, but he has no skill for words. Mostly they are heavy and inconvenient, so he uses his own sparingly, and learns to use other's sentences and fragments to describe his thoughts.
His mother has a way with them though, twists her tongue around them easily where Nate's mouth can only stutter over them clumsily. She never searches for them, never is without something to say, the perfect thing to say. He would be envious, but she is so good with them that he thinks she can speak well enough for the both of them.
Even when she gets sick and her voice starts to fail from the exhaustion of the illness, she is still so much better than him. But she promises that she loves his voice more than any other, so he sits by her bedside and reads Eliot and Whitman and Rilke, and sometimes she will even coax him into singing. She has a particular fondness for Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Nate will spend hours curving his tongue around her words until the pages of the book are wrinkled and faded.
These words feel light on his tongue, and she teaches him the value of both words and silence in the stark white of her hospital room.
His mother dies in January, and all he wants to do is scream, scream until his lungs fail, until he has exhausted himself into a dreamless sleep. Instead, he runs. Leaves the room with the screaming blank tone and his father's voice and his mother's cold body at a run, doesn't look back, doesn't stop until he reaches the edge of the water.
It's freezing here, and he tries to remember how warm his mother was, can only think of her hand's coolness in his and the biting chill of the air, wonders what poem, what song, what picture could ever portray this feeling of heartbreaking, cold emptiness that seems to compose his entire chest better than the deep black of the water that refuses to even reflect his image back at him.
Nate takes deep breaths, deep full breathes composed of cold and salt and sadness, as if trying to assure himself that he is still alive, that her death has only taken a part of him. The summer part, he thinks, because she had a summer birthday, sixteen years of baking her sloppy cakes and drawing her sloppy cards. How can your mother be dead when you've only been alive sixteen years?
And he runs again, runs as if he can turn back time, as though he might be able to catch the barrier between Heaven and Earth and break right through to bring her back, because didn't they understand that he needed her, her warmth and her words and her silences and her, just his mother, because he still feels like a little boy sometimes, most times, and he needs his mom?
Once again he reaches the water, and tries to think of something to say to himself, something to fill his chest with blood and air and warmth rather than this terrible aching coldness, but now his words seem more than clumsy, they seem perverse and inadequate and so he stays silent and walks home in the cold, dark rain that has started to fall. He hates how well it seems to fit this day, this lonely boy he has suddenly become.
When he reaches home, Nate collapses on his bed and finds the book of poetry in his jacket pocket, miraculously protected from the rain, and grips it so hard that he thinks that maybe the ink will sink into the lines of his fingertips and gift him with their words. And only then does he cry, great, wracking sobs that tear through his whole body, and leave him exhausted and spent and cold, and he climbs under his blankets and huddles around himself in his wet clothes, feeling he will never be properly warm again. He wonders if he will ever find the words to express how great the hole in his heart is, how the cold feels in his chest, how he is already forgetting her voice and her warmth though he clings desperately, pathetically to all the little things he loved about her.
But he has never been very good with words.