Silence

The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.

Lies were something you told other people to make things easier, somehow - hopefully, for them, but often more selfishly for yourself.

She wanted to die. She wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness - over. And she had said nothing then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother’s pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal. As if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again.

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn’t remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.

Chase stretched. "I'll give you the week." And he held up his pinky. Eric grimaced. He HATED this part. "Shake on it, pinky shake, or we don't have a deal." "You're an asshole," Eric told him. "Pretty much." He waited until Eric did, in fact, lock pinkies with him.

Everything happens at night. The world changes, the shadows grow, there's secrecy and privacy in dark places. First kiss at night, by the monkey bars and the old swings that the children and their parents have vacated; second, longer kiss, by the bike stands, swirl of dust around feet in the dry summer air. Awkward words, like secrets just waiting to be broken, the struggle to find the right ones, the heady fear of exposure --- what if, what if --- the joy when the words are returned. Love, in the parkette, while the moon waxes and the clouds pass. Promises at night. Not first promises --- those are so old they can't be remembered --- but new promises, sharp and biting; they almost hurt to say, but it's a good hurt. Dreams at night, before sleep, and dreams during sleep. Everything, always, happens at night.