Little Talks

caesura: [vii]

caesura (n): a pause in a line of verse, usually in poetry

Summer was quiet, without Allie. Different from the usual quiet that she left in her wake; her family would usually spend most of the summer in Springfield, while I stayed behind with Mariam and Kells in Chicago. No, this quiet was the dead sort. The worst sort, in my opinion. Because, before, she had only been miles away, there was no reaching her now.

And, as this year had it, I couldn’t seem to reach any of my friends. Chessy was visiting family in Canada, Mariam was touring Europe, and Kells was in New York, working as a counselor at an art camp. The streets were empty, quiet, and dead. The neighbourhood kids seemed to have grown up during the time I spent holed away in my room, the curtains shut and my computer humming wildly as I watched the vapid shows that the internet provided. My family had learned, after the first week, not to knock on my door, and I was mostly left alone, save the days that my brother felt generous enough to drag me to the frozen yogurt shop a few blocks down; we had fallen back into the pattern created in the early days of middle school, but this time, it was all backwards. I was supposed to be the one begging him to take me across town. Not the one being begged to leave my room.

 

Grief was a bitter thing, I concluded one day, after spending most of it curled on my bed, nursing a tattered copy of Chasing Vermeer. Someone must have wronged it, long ago, as it flung its dark matter at my mind, shrouding it in biting shadows that tore at my gut before pushing their way out of my eyes in the form of tears. And the tears did come. Too often, if I could have had it my way. But that’s the thing; when someone decides to leave, decides to take themselves away, it’s anything but your way. So I was left in the hands of a bitter, caustic power that drained my energy and my thoughts and the life from me.

 

I finally had the guts to open my email two months after. There were hundreds of messages, from friends, from social networking sites that I hadn’t gone near since Allie’s death, from everyone. I scrolled through the mess, deleting most of everything, save a few. I was towards the bottom of the list when I saw a message from an email that I thought would have been deleted two months, or at least a month ago.

 

from <alliercatwilliams@gmail.com>

 

And, suddenly, grief was a war. Except in this war, the generals, instead of trying to protect their troops, can only think of how to better kill the soldiers on the other side.

++++++

 

The message was sent the day I was at Mariam’s; the exact time I had left for her house, actually. I couldn’t force myself to open it, and closed my mailbox instead.

 

I wish I could have closed my mind too.

 

++++++

 

Whispers were the first thing I thought of as I walked through the doors of my high school; behind hands, behind long hair, and behind nothing at all. I was no longer the close friend of Mariam and Kells. I was the best friend of the dead girl. The dead girl that left us all hanging. Left us all wondering what we missed, what we could have done to make her stay. Maybe that’s it; maybe the idea of wondering what we could have done to make her stay was the very thing that made her leave. Maybe we weren’t on the same wavelength, weren’t thinking the same thoughts. And now I wish that maybe I could have read her thoughts.

 

The best friend of the dead girl. It’s such a dirty sentence, a sentence that apparently didn’t deserve anything more than a whisper and a crinkled nose. “Dead girl” sounded so harsh, so cruel; almost like rancid meat, it was thrown about. No one wanted to see it, touch it, smell it, go near it, yet it drew them like flies to the mere idea of it. And I had no honey to draw them away, so they flocked to it though the week, the month.

 

Chessy was the only one that remained by my side, really. The dramatic duo of Mariam and Kells [always said in that order, heaven knows why] coped differently; I was content with a book and a friend’s presence, the latter provided by Chessy. She and I were alike in the sense that we liked quiet. Not awkward pauses, but silent conversations. We fit, like puzzles pieces, and it worked.

 

Until Chessy was forced to switch schools, and I was once again left alone. Left alone to face the stares of underclassmen, seniors, classmates. I was alone in a crowd of familiar faces, none of which had any interest in finding the honey. Flies, all of them. Too ignorant, stupid, unintelligent, to search.

 

But as one left, another came to take their place. The home of the Williams’, which had been suddenly vacated during the summer, was filled. Two large moving vans came by in the middle of September, and their contents quickly vanished into the home.

 

“Hi, miss.” The men carrying a faux leather sofa nodded a hello to me, and I raised my hand slightly in return. The driver, I guess, was leaning against his truck, a water bottle clutched in his hand. “Do you know where I might be able to fill this up?” I didn’t speak for a few moments, not able to believe that the lawn I stood on would no longer be a second home. The house across the street would no longer hold a second family. I wordlessly took the bottle, and jogged back to my house. A mindless task for an empty mind.

 

Two days later, the residents moved themselves into the home.

And the lawn was no longer friendly territory.