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.
