The Passage of Time

The silence was paper thin, razor sharp chipped in places with a retrospective dance of tongues. A well-used silence, it was an infantry-man’s bayonet poised for attack, stabbing into the tender flesh of a young love newly blossomed now withered to flapping dewlaps of unrealised dreams. Now crushing into the oncoming traffic of bottled up rage, the silence took a moment to compose itself. A deep breath was sunk into the chambers of aborted fights, and then the silence let loose a barrage of words. They knocked him clean off the mezzanine floor to a level below.

“GET OUT!” she screamed!

“I am sorry! “ You whined at a decibel shy of what her ears can pick up from the floor into her writhing frothing mind that had all checks thrown to the side.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!” She bellowed into the splitting seams of your patched up wits, those deserters soon a distant memory at the back of your mind.

“PLEASE!” She rasped as an afterthought that shredded your confidence to tattered apologies, stumbling drunk out of your chalky husk of a mouth. No amount of prodding would Necromance this dead horse back to life. You picked up the disembowelled entrails of the love you once shared. You shoved them back into your skeletal heart with hurried care. The neighbours might snatch those bits and pieces and sew themselves into the folds of her heart.

The silence screeched to a halt as she stormed out from your life, the destruction in her wake held echoes of words left unsaid now lacking, a morbid void wider growing in the barrage of sound. The ticking and the tocking of your wrist watch, an assault of a thousand foot soldiers, now marching in line to the shooting fields, bayonets raised over grim faces and brought down with a roar of young men new to war soon disillusioned their bravado now wavering. 

Thick warm blood soon spattered and spilled, draining out of chambers of your battered heart. In the last moments of the rest of your life, you lay in the muddy fields of miscommunication and reflected upon the deep well of sadness in which you drowned gulping down the words you never had a chance to say to her. All the while the ever present silence looked on, a witness to a murderous crime, observing the passage of time, with a cold unflinching heart of stone. The silence watched dispassionately the last moments you gasped, the bobbing of your throat like flotsam out into the sea, chugged this way and that with the twitching of your limbs. Smoke in your eyes, you prepared for the final jump but still images of her lingered like silvery clouds across the open sky that were slowly drifting, drifting, drifting…