silence

What a strange sensation to experience the silent implosion of a relationship. I’ve lost friends and partners before, of course, but never on such terms. (Funny how we talk about losing those we love, as though the melancholy language of loss somehow mutes the violence of such ruptures.) This was no long, slow disintegration, no casual growing apart. One moment we saw some common point or path and the next we didn’t.

That, perhaps, is normal, maybe even mundane. What I find harder to grasp is the abruptness and aggressive passivity of that moment. We didn’t quarrel. We had no discussion. There was no fumbling toward such a conclusion. In fact, as far as I can tell, we have not even shared some mutual revelation. Rather, we have, quite simply, come to silence.

For a significant period of my life, we shared daily conservations, long emails, physical and emotional companionship, and a deep and respectful love. Then sometime in the last weeks, whatever it was that connected us— the aforementioned love, an attraction, intellectual curiosity, or artistic vision or perhaps just some unspeakable hope or need— changed. I cannot mark that moment of change because, to be honest, I did not recognize its passing. For days I looked upon the silence with a casual indifference. We’ll speak soon.

Soon, was in retrospect, a radical shift in and of itself. But not so radical as this: the central figure in my narrative has disappeared without so much as signaling an exit. I write these lines from a distance that has afforded me a degree of certainty. We are through.

Given the importance I have so long attributed to this relationship, the increasing finality of silence is surprisingly easy to swallow. Neither good nor bad, but merely fact. Yet, the nature of my being pushes me to question. So I am sitting here attempting to construct a chronology of silence. To determine the precise moment when we vanished into the nothingness that has since come to occupy this space. No luck.

The last words we spoke were the same: Love you. Love you. I love you. Three of the most powerful words in the English language strung together in a phrase meant to express a profound and inexpressible connectivity. Of course, words in and of themselves possess no power, but rather are animated by the meaning with which we endow them. As I sit here, I am trying to recall if ‘I love you’ could have as easily have been ‘Pass the potatoes’ or ‘window dirt marmalade.’ Again, no luck.

The only true conclusion I have drawn is not even a conclusion so much as a confirmation of experienced belief. I think that Frost was right: the world does not end in fire, but in ice. The true losses in my life have all been experienced through moments frozen in haunting tranquility. While thankfully I do not find myself wrestling with grief as in the past, I cannot deny that this moment—for its implication as much as its gravity and finality-- ranks among those before and after events through which I have lived. So from this view, it is fitting that we should end in silence and absence, in conditions that to me taste of only one thing: death.

So, what does it say about me then that I am not grieving? What does it say about me that having essentially died and watched death, I am no different? What does that say about me?