The Way We Hear

I finally got my reason, yet here I was babbling on and on like an oaf.

They walked by the light of a full moon on a Friday the 13th (cliché, trust me I know). Snow crunched under every footstep, imprinting evidence of everything about each other they were leaving behind. They went on in silence, as if they didn’t know what to say, but having every thought they’d ever had run through their mind at once. She laughed nervously as she only knew how when she knew nothing she’d say could change anything. Simply, she giggled. It was a sound he knew well. Everything about the evening was familiar—from the dialogue to the gestures and those ever-longing gazes they ogled at one another. All the words had been said in exhausted manners to form any phrase they could recite in their sleep by now. Even their body language acted all on its own, charading a past rendezvous, for the second time transpiring on a Friday the 13th. The taboo around the date was a distant, yet omni-present force causing a heap of welcome mayhem in their hands, perhaps a subconscious foreboding destined to happen long before they could even think up the coincidence. They finally reached the landing up the stairs to where she was residing at the time, after what seemed like the longest walk. The walk appeared to have taken eons because they left the air between them void of rhyme or reason, vowel or sound. Once they arrived at their destination, they instantaneously became aware that the walk would never be long enough. It was not the second or third time they’d said goodbye, but now the fourth. This time, however, it was almost a reassuring gesture. She couldn’t help but smile at this incandescent and incessant boy in her life, doomed by him for the rest of her days. If he didn’t know it now, she was assured this time that he would grow to understand just how much she cared for him. She came to the realization that it wasn’t his stubbornness blinding him from comprehending this particular truth. No, in fact he wasn’t ready to get it, and she was certain that in his own time, he would understand and she would simply just have to wait. So, in that moonlight from a full moon on a Friday the 13th on another cold winter night, she geekily grinned at that boy.

He watched her intensely, but unnoticeably. He reveled in it. He was awed by this woman walking beside him, walking so tall, so assertively. The actions were routine to him at this point, but he still found himself saying the words. As much as he wished she’d find better, he was humanely comforted by her graceful knowledge of him. For as much as he knew she didn’t know about him, this woman knew all about him. He deemed it marvelous, especially in this moment they were somehow sharing though he felt it all to himself. She stood there shivering, fruitful, and still, after everything, happy. This alone made him a painstaking sort of gleeful. It was almost like she could feel every way for him and it would be satisfying still. Once he looked up and locked his eyes on the full moon, then simultaneously caught her smile, he felt it. It was in this cheesy real life moment he realized that the silence in their walk held every answer he’d ever needed for any question he’d ever asked.

They came to an agreement from a deafening silence, that never in their oncoming, unpredictable, puzzling, intelligent lives, would it be too late. They lived, always comparing to the crunching of snow, the syncing of heartbeats. This I thought, is the stuff they need to make movies about.