"Just tell me that we're still friends at least, and I'll stop bothering you"

I've gotten so many messages like these this past week and a half from friends who did nothing wrong.


Tendrils of thinning cloud whipped down and broke upon the horizon; the sky was lit up with flecks of color that spilled around the powder paleness and made her remember threads and soft methodical hands and fabric from a different era of life. The air, like soup, was thick and seasoned with pollen dander and the narcotic effect of un-opened buds. She tasted it on her tongue and rolled it in the pocks of her cheek before exhaling, before blinking, before breathing and ordering limbs to continue their mechanical stride. Words were dripping out again; their withered exo-skeletons began to coat the pavement and suffocate the greenery. The lesser, more buoyant ones floated like fat puffs of steam and stuck to the blue above. Was all the color unsaid words ?-- she wondered as the sky became more festive and her stomach no longer drooped with extra weight at their extrication. She was light now, almost light enough to follow her counterparts into the soft stains of chroma but she remained with the earth and continued home. Her passivity (and I say this word with the most weight a word could possibly carry) was the reason that she still existed a breathing brain with rooted feet. An earth child instead of a snuff of air and dust.

She said this statement and wondered, as was typical, if there was a deeper reason she was here tonight on this road thinking these things. But she was the only listener; the speaker and the receiver who would haply rest with these unsaid thoughts and no one would hear their searching, groping, obtuseness; if not today, then not ever. And time would fray and wrinkle their meaning and the lack of a subpoena would leave her quiet testimony to settle dead and unheard by the impassive ears of the world. Or maybe they would help her float up when she grew too tired and nestle themselves thickly over blue, faded skin and joints. They might lay her to a final languorous rest and then snap and disappear.

But still, no one would hear.

Maybe the whole sky is filled with un-said words from other times and people..... and so she cried because she would never hear their lingering thoughts that she craved for solace. Everything was so much more beautiful than ocular attention demanded and everything was so quiet but still incredibly loud. And she simply did not have the right ears or eyes or comprehension to hear, see, or feel things the way she so desperately needed. She wanted to submerge, gulp, inhale, flux her tanned skin to soupy sky broth; drown in the pureness of color and never resurface.