Every word that falls from my lips is untasted, preserved in its bitterness by the space between me and you like a vice that ferments and grows in silence.
But in the reality that a tree will still make a sound if it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, I’ll chance to tell your unlistening ears a story that fell into my head today.
I saw myself in a room, in the same reality as your past, but in my present body,
Knowing all that happened between us, and aware of a stigma that does not exist between us as of this moment in your past.
You are a silhouette, a small brown head, among how many other small heads in a classroom, around a table, on the stairways?
Elementary school, maybe even middle school. Years before I know you and you knew me,
When we were separate and had not joined, when existed but were unknown.
Maybe I was a teacher in a classroom, or just another student visiting, on some educational excuse, and watched you, and assessed you. Quiet, and with a quiet something wrong with your body. You were a defect. There was a quiet acceptance and maybe there was a defiance in your brown eyes. Chocolate brown eyes, or iodine? Or gasoline?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
What if I had the chance?
In this reality, I was, for the only time, taller than you. My shadow fell on you, but you were absorbed in a book. Typical. My shadow was too contrasted from the ink to divert your attention.
And here, I had the upper hand.
You were not on your guard, friend. You were trusting, or something like it. Maybe it was the childish, young semblance of cocky assuredness that you were immortal.
Maybe, in this instance, you were innocent.
Maybe you had not yet given up on the fact that none of us ever were.
Something was in my hand, as I stood over your shoulder. It could have been anything to fit the picture, a pencil, a pen. A sharpie.
My eyes were not on the object, so I don’t know. It felt long, sharp, and on the fence about what it was meant to do, to create or to destroy.
I too, was on the fence.
The classroom, suddenly (if it had been filled with filler characters in the vision before this transition) was empty. I, the unperceived grim, had the faceless and unbiased entity of silence on my side as my own personal weapon.
I could do it. I could hurt you. I could hurt you, and make you hurt, and make you bleed that blood through all your organs and your dysfunctional body that has something wrong with it that I will never understand through experience but was left to guess about because I had to trouble myself with something about you to show that I cared, in some form.
Maybe, it would make me whole, would keep me from being dysfunctional. Me, not having given up on the fact that none of us were ever functional to begin with.
Unaware that I was still there, a hovering, self-interested ghost, you turned a page and kept reading in the empty, nondescript classroom that my own mind had designed for you.
I wondered, in that moment, out of nowhere, where all the other kids were.
Knowing you, you had made the independent decision of keeping your solitude. It seems like something even a younger version of you would do. Something that always made me laugh a little, because your comfort with being alone made me uncomfortable in the way that misunderstanding something always makes someone feel uncomfortable with their own perception of reality.
But there was always the chance that (and I always wondered this): the other kids had not wanted to play with you at all, and in defense, you made the choice to be alone.
Was that fortress that you built yourself for the miser of a kingdom of one? Or did it make you feel like a monarch encased in a palace?
You will never, ever answer me that for the simple reason (and you would be right in saying) that I don’t deserve to know what the answer would be.
But back to the vision, in which you are defenseless and under my thumb, and I have been stalling myself from contemplating the morality of my choices.
The water had not yet crossed under the bridge, you see, and I was keeping myself in limbo.
Limbo, I find, is often easier than admitting that you are telling the truth (and finding that you don’t like it) or lying to yourself to make yourself feel better, but always having that little weight against your chest to tell you that you are a liar, and that is the ugly truth of the matter.
I stood over your pale, face with the budding defiance in your chocolate (iodine? gasoline?) eyes. And I would win, if I wanted to.
I took a step into the oblivion of my oblivion, the vision of my vision, the suspended reality of this dream world suspended even still within the reality in which you are reading these words-
I asked myself:
Is it possible to avenge yourself before you have been beaten?
In that reality, in which I stood like the reaper over a younger version of you,
before I loved you, before I hated you,
before I gave so much of me that it was somehow allowable for me to call a part of you mine…
I hesitated so quietly that even a literal tree would not have made a sound in the silence of that envisioned void.
Would it make it better, now, to fix something that had not even been given the chance to have been broken?
My God, what a ******* paradox.
The truth, you ungrateful (and I guess rightfully ungrateful, because this was only the mercy that I owed you) acquaintance (because I guess that’s all I have the right to call you, even after all this time and every word that we’ve spat that I still hear in my heart after months and months of typing messages and then deleting them because there is nothing to say to you and I am painfully aware of this distance within every neuron that makes up my own miserable, wretched, beautiful existence) is that I realized that you, small and quiet and alone by choice,
You had done nothing. Not yet. And it was not you that owed my blood.
And it was not you, in that reality, that was owed this apology.
This is an apology that you will never really receive, because although I have tried to find the words to throw at you, you would never, ever take them, because you are the king of the palace you built yourself,
And I’m just a stranger now, knocking at your doors, with a remarkably familiar face.
And as I lowered my hand, and whatever potential weapon was in it, the smaller version of you never turned around.
Secure in your innocence and protected by it.
At least in my innocence, and maybe even still in my hopes and wishful thinking about who we both are,
You are still innocent.
Innocent. Green, without the thorns yet that would someday make me bleed.
The vision ended there. I never saw your face, and you never saw mine. I guess there was no way to even know for sure that it was you, and not just my imagination placing you there for my own musing. Maybe I just wanted to see you.
Not in a naive way, like I miss you. If I miss anything, it is who I thought you were, not who you have proven yourself to be. I’m sure you feel the same way about me.
This vision must reflect a parting of the ways, a final apology and goodbye, though you will almost certainly never read this and even more certainly never acknowledge that you did if you somehow bridged the gap between the classroom reality and the one in which there is an elephant in whatever room we are accidentally trapped in, together, for the space of a moment before one of us steps out the door.
In the vision, I stepped out the door. My back to you, I heard you turn a page of your book, and continue the story from one page break to the beginning of the next sentence.
And in the same manner, reader, so must I.
Now, we are just strangers in the hall
Without a hurt or hope to give,
Without a word at all.
