sound // silence

The sun is just beginning to set, caught in those few minutes where the sky is the most vivid. Like colored tears draining into each other, a golden eye open for just a moment before it's gone.

I drive home with the radio all the way up, the windows all the way down. And this time when you cross my mind, I let the wind take the breath from my lungs. I can't say for sure whether I make any noise at all, only that the speedometer is approaching eighty and the sound of the radio is vibrating my seat.

Nothing we did was ever loud.

I drive by the water, you know it's not on the way home, but I do it anyway. The seagulls outside the car circle and swoop, cawing at the light as it slips away. They drown out the music, somehow, but I still hear your voice in my head, begging me to stay.

You never saw the ocean. Not with me, anyway.

I turn the car around, backtracking until the roads are more familiar. Not that I don't know this town, but some streets I've been driving down since I was in a car seat. This is the path back home. In a sense.

When can you move back home? I hold a hand out the window to catch the breeze, remembering the first time someone asked me that. My new boss, as a matter of fact. And my father shortly after.

Home, as if it isn't still across the country with you.

I try to turn up the radio, but it won't go. I have to stop at a light and a wrinkled man and a woman hidden behind a sunhat look at me. The man's mouth frowns deeply, moving in unintelligible complaints. I wonder if there's enough sunlight left to see the trails the tears have left on my face. Or maybe I look too normal, I never was very good at getting emotional.

This is only a step backwards, is what you told me.

But how could I promise myself, I muse--foot on the gas, goodbye old man--to the life you wanted? Now that my brain's cracked open with the thought of you, it's seeping out through my skin. I feel like I'm burning from the inside out, knuckles white and my every cell remembering how you used to touch me. Hold me. Cry with me. You wanted a family. You wanted a stable life in a stable town. You wanted to fall in love, and we accidentally did. Are you sorry?

I am.

These roads are winding, narrow. I could just about navigate them with my eyes closed. Everything here's just as I remember it, down to the smell of water, the soft dirt. The distant sound of traffic and tree limbs hanging over the road, almost close enough to touch. Like a bubble with every point accessible from the center, just nothing beyond. Contained. Or waiting to pop.

I park the car in the garage. The radio is off but my mind is filled with deafening roar. I still picture what it'd be like to walk through the front door and have you greet me. A fantasy, but my mind itches for it. Instead, I greet the silence.

I only wonder: does the silence greet you, too?