This awkward silence makes me crazy. I fix my eyes on the floor, entranced in the layers of loops in the stained cream carpet. I don't blink for what feels like hours at a time, testing the willpower and the strength of my eyelids to see how long I can keep them open. My vision begins to blur and tears form in the dark corners of my radiant sea-blue eyes, and I'm not positive whether they are tears from the dry pain consuming them or from your words that hurl at me, bouncing off my skin as if being rejected by Jesus at the glowing gates of heaven, and falling to the same stained cream carpet I gaze at. I watch them crash to the floor and writhe beneath me, banging their fists on the floor, screaming at the top of their little lungs, running in circles and eating each other alive. I then begin to wonder whether it matters where the tears come from, what caused the flood down my face like water through a leaky dam built when "engineers" were merely cowboys with hammers and nails.

The look in your eyes makes me crazy; why I refrain from making direct eye contact. The carpet will suffice, at least it doesn't stare back with those eyes. Your notice of the tears cascading slowly down the soft curve of my blood rushed cheeks changes your mood instantly, and I can feel the color of your aura change as your tone drops. You apologize and I watch the words dance on the floor beneath my feet. "I'm" dances slowly in circles, a slow lonely waltz, next to my loose shoe lace in an empty section of this stained old carpet covered with conversation. "Sorry" lays flat, twitching on the tip of my shoe, convulsing almost to the beat of my heart, which I can hear pulsing through my headache. You wait for a response, a word, a few words, anything. But it seems you have taken them all already. And all the words I could say now lay beautifully still on this carpet of mine.