So Quiet

I watch you as you walk from room to room.  The tears are flowing down your cheeks but you seem not to notice.  You are locked away in your own insular world.

You wander into the bedroom.  As you enter your step falters.  I notice for the first time that you are trembling.  Violent sobs fill the room.  Your gaze doesn’t leave the framed photo beside the bed.  The image is of a young woman; her face is radiant with happiness.

Unsteadily you make your way across the room.  Collapsing onto the bed, you pick up the photo and clutch it to you.  Your lips move silently but I know what you are saying.  The word is why; over and over, why.

You don’t sense me here with you; all you know is your grief.  The pain you are feeling is all consuming.  I want to reach out to you but there is no point; I couldn’t reach you no matter how hard I tried.

You turn and bury your face into the welcoming depths of your pillow; the photo clasped against your breaking heart.  Piece by piece you are coming apart and there is nothing I can do.

The doorbell breaks the half-silence.  Still cradling the photo, you blindly make your way to the door and fumble with the latch.  Standing on the step is a man, your friend; no words pass between you as you let him in.

You head back to the bedroom and fall face down on the bed, the photo never leaving its position against your dying heart.  Your friend follows you.

“Why did she do it?”

Your friend sits next to you, not quite knowing what to do.

“I found her here… she was so cold.  Until I touched her I thought she was asleep.  So cold.”

You sound so lost and confused, like a small boy instead of the man you are.  Your friend places a hand on your shoulder.  I feel angry; but my anger isn’t with him or with you; it’s with me.  Anger at my selfishness; anger at just sitting back and watching you tear yourself apart.  But there’s nothing else I can do.

“Why?  Why did she do it?  Why?  Was it me?”

Your friend doesn’t reply; he can’t, he doesn’t know the answer.  I do.  I want to tell you that there was nothing you could have done; that it was nothing you did or didn’t do.  I want to make you understand that, as much as she loved you, she was ill and that illness clouded her logic.  She never meant to hurt you like this; she just needed to be free of the darkness that was shadowing her mind.

I want to tell you all this and more, but I can’t.  Instead I just have to watch you as you drown in sorrow.  Because now it is too late for me and too late for words.  However much I may want to reach you, this ghost can’t speak.