Hollow Talks

I haven't come to terms with seeing you only for small talk.

Our existence together was a dance, an easy sliding of tectonic plates over one another. No friction. No catches. Just smooth sailing, you and I. It was effortless, like breathing in the morning fog.

I knew the touch of you.

And I knew what that touch transmitted. I could tell by the smell of your sweat what sort of day you were having. God, the kinds of conversations we had in silence were something else. Whole universes unravelled between us and we were explorers of their depths, crawling through the cosmos with confident silence because these lines of dialogue can never be put to the page.

I don't think we ever made small talk.

When we did open our mouths, it was to share the heartbreak of the smashed moth on the windshield or the raccoon thumping underfoot, dead three times over. We laughed when it rained. And rambled on and on and on about the things that could live in the cornfields.

You told me not to cry over dead lightning bugs.

Maybe that was my first warning sign that this poetry between us would turn into stale nothingness.

We get together once a year now, but the crowd is so big I can't ever hear you and what I do catch is useless. Every sentence has one stuck underneath it. And we should be saying the unsaid but we're out of practice, aren't we?

"Weather's nice."

But we don't chase lightning anymore.

"You look great."

But healthy doesn't suit your mind.

"I've been keeping busy."

Staring at the gap you've left in my nights.

And then what? You drink your beer and silence settles between us, the kind that used to inspire invisible conversations but this time I can only hear an apology for letting me go. And I'm saying it too.

I don't like making small talk with you.

How could I when I'll always remember what our silence was like?