What I Couldn't Say

The silent storyteller suffers more suspense than the waiting audience. The words cling to the mind instead of the tongue like icy water on an arctic expedition. Mutiny. Everyone wants to go home, of course. The skin misses the feeling of being human, being loved and respected because a ship can never stop floating on, drifting away even when there is no wind. It is not a human journey after some point in time. It is a number of heartbeats, not a number of beating hearts. It is a number with units of mass, not a number of the confined things that amass and gather nothing, but are still held in the fragile cages of the withering, confused soul. Still, the little stack of wood and exaggerated matches makes the journey beyond the maker of its journey. What is one cell, one body gone as long as the rest keep moving on? Some things will always, are bound to keep going.

Take the sum of at least seven wills to survive, and what is the outcome? An inequality, of course, an inverse equation pushed upon the sole, stable constant of simply being. It's still the physical world, after all. There must be something that is tangible in order for this to pull itself out of bed in the morning and sneak off while the mind is still asleep.

Presence is all that is needed for movement. Presence is movement, as the air is never still and the stream is never quite clear. We are all washing, of course. Trying to redeem ourselves so that our hands our clean but our minds are muddled. The feeling of being wet, even after the storm makes us feel alive. It's as if we're defiant of the water, the flood that's bound to wipe our dear hearts. Of course, the most painful of hearts drowns slowly and silently in its own pain.

This could very well be in a lonely little bathtub while the ship is a tumbling ice tray in a jumbled icebox. This could be the very essence of summer rebelling against the reality of the situation outside the unchanging tile walls. It's not as if one person takes one seat at one time, after all. Where does the winter go when the summer decides it's time to sweep in? It sits in its own little waiting room, or perhaps does a few rounds in the hall, bottling up all of the sickness and anger until someone just seems to call the right name. Then, the cold pinch of ice flickers and squeezes its miserly self into a random summer shower, as happens every year. Of course, the waiting is never cured.

Still, the impossible is so easily filed. It's only more complicated when imaginary clients of creativity start to make friends, as people do on these misleading voyages of leisure.