The First Words of a Broken Heart

You taught me to play with words.

You said they were rolling stones that will slip across my tongue if I try.
You said they were so smooth that I could make honeycombs with them.
You said you loved how tantalising the words coming out of my mouth felt.
You said I should sing my own story.
You said “Go ahead, Litter loops of your sentences.”
You said words make history, the future is waiting for new words everyday.
You said ‘speak’. 

I said silence was my kind of word.

I said quiet had a radiance that would always appeal to me.
I said tranquility made me pick up a book and sniff it’s pages and listen to the story it rattled out.
I believed that silence could  let me walk into so many tomorrows where the night sky embraced my thoughts a park bench.
I said your silence always spoke to me through your eyes.
I told you that I would always know what you wanted to say.
It has been a while and I still think of how words sneakily left your eyes and I couldn’t hear them.

The pain. The tumor. The cancer.

I had blank pages; you had no lines.
I had my eyes closed; you had a painful song.
I had a park bench; you had a tireless smile.
I had an ice cream; you had a tissue.
I had a shoulder; you had a body 
And the air around us, was already scared of speechlessness.

In your head you might have said,”I am dying”
In mine I definitely said, “Maybe not”
And our phones turned hot through hours and hours of silence-
Until you finally succumbed into my dreams one morning and continued to live there.

I assemble words now. 
I let my voice slip like honey, rattle haphazardly but never let it disappear unheard;

Now words get to me the way silence got to you.

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