Quiet Voices

We watched thunder as it lumbered over the horizon,

And running wasn’t fast enough to grant escape.

Suddenly, the hands I held were six feet away from mine.

We collapsed, separately.

I awoke the next morning to rain, gray and unabated,

Speaking with a hushed hiss.

And now, without the sound of summer baseball games,

The park is quiet, too quiet

The street is is silent

The store is quiet

The house is quiet

The world feels

empty

as it was on the day that it was born

I count the times I didn’t say goodbye.

Time chains hours to its back,

Drags the burden across the world.

My body moves through congested air.

But somewhere above there is a breeze.

Summer approaches and delivers fresh sunshine.

The sky is blue and bluer at dusk

The trees are in bloom

The world is still beautiful, the world is waking up.

I find the sidewalk where we once stood

Abandoned, save for stray silhouettes and a single, untrampled, dandelion

I play the voicemail you left me when I need a song to fill the silence

You laugh, and tell me you’re doing alright.

You laugh, and there is no such thing as distance.

A bee collides with the screen in the window,

Interrupts my listening with an anger too epic for its quiet hum.

I smile.

That is the first real voice I’ve heard here in a long time.