Dorothy

I can't really call this a lesbian love story, now can I? You won't find much on love in here. More of the pain brought on by any lingering feelings of a relationship that's already run its course.

I last heard her voice under the shade of our favorite tree. We both liked the way it groaned from its roots when we pressed our ears against the bark. On that day, the tree had quieted--not even the leaves shuddered against each other. I barely made out the broad tenor of the clouds rustling overhead. We sat apart -- the silence that’d been growing for months now yawned between us. The remnants of a dying dry storm shivered through the air.

On Saturday mornings, we used to lie here on our backs and listen to the deep thrum of cars driving by on the highway. As each headlight turned the world into swaths of golden black, we scrawled strangers’ lives into the sound of it. Most times, it was a useless endeavor. We weren’t jaded enough to understand that there was no way our crude ad libs would ever come close to reality. It was simply us trying to make sense out of the noise.

Everything was loud back then. If we couldn’t hear the buzz of incandescent light bulbs, the whisper of shoes as people paced in and out of our lives, or even the barely intelligible murmur of the neighbors’ TV, we’d listen to our heartbeats booming in our ears. We never truly learned silence. At least, she never did.

She absentmindedly began to hum. The sound of it hung loosely in the gulf between us, a reminder that bridges could still be built. I joined her soon after, accepting her invitation. We didn’t speak. Talking had long frayed for both of us, but humming was somehow still comfortable. For the first time in months, she truly listened to me. I could almost feel that mindless tune spreading out, tangling with the thin branches overhead, swooping over the entire field, maybe even reaching back and intertwining with the first time I heard her voice.

There used to be a never-ending dialogue. Every time we spoke, we were simply picking up from where we left off -- nothing we ever did or said was stand alone. She usually shaped the conversation because she thought more lucidly than I did. Her world was layered with thousands of paint splotches just waiting for her to peel back and reveal the drywall meaning. Everything rang of poetry, and she suspended each nuance in written word. She was sensitive in that way.

I don’t know when we realized that the noise was becoming too loud. It never bothered me until she started to complain about it. Then I began to notice. I wish I hadn’t because once I started to really listen, I couldn’t stop. The little things began to agitate me -- the way voices cut off after we’d twine fingers, people hesitating mid sentence if I held her gaze for too long, the hush chasing the ends of my sentences when I spoke to her. We didn’t even have to do anything and I could hear it in the stillnesses of everyone I talked to. After a while, we even grew to hate the steady rushing of our own lungs.

In a lot of ways, it hurt her more than it hurt me. Every word carried weight and she felt them with too much intensity. She wore sentences like a yoke clamped around her neck, binding her to her insecurities. Her body seemed to twist into itself, becoming a permanent question asking, Why? I couldn’t bear the sight of bowed shoulders and limp arms. At first, she tried to move through life quietly, making room for the cacophony that now seemed to hover at the edge of everything. She didn’t realize that it would feed on the space she’d left open.

She took to drowning out everything with too loud, too angry music. The wire connecting her iPod to her headphones became her lifeline, forever looping around her. The problem was that she drowned me out too.

We watched as day slowly surrendered to night. The song continued, wavering awkwardly around us. I couldn’t help but notice that the normal slurs of color were strangely muted. No longer was there red defiantly streaking across somber purple. No sickeningly bright yellow just barely reigned in by grey. All we saw was blue deepening into black, night extinguishing day without the intermediate dusk. It seemed strangely fitting.

I should’ve known what was happening after she began to forget the sound of the microwave whirring in the morning as I heated up leftovers for her. I tried to ignore the twist in my gut as I came home to cold hot dogs, untouched. She would eventually forget everything, even my voice. I knew it in the way she no longer shifted in her sleep when I whispered confessions into her hair, sheltered by half-remembered dreams. Her silences stretched wider and wider. It didn’t take very long for her to simply stop listening when I spoke. I guess she learned it from everyone around us. They too closed their ears before either of us could explain.

She left just as the sun fully melted into the horizon. I lingered longer than I should've, continuing the melody in the hopes that she would eventually come back. As the song faded away, I listened to the quiet, unnerved that even my heartbeat seemed muffled. 

I fled. 

By the time I found my way home, the suitcase that’d stood open since I first began to notice the silences had disappeared.

Author's Note

Somewhat miscategorized, but I guess it fits best. This is probably premature, considering I'm still in the middle of editing, but I guess I need to post something now that I've got my account up and running. If anything, it needs objective feedback, so if you have any comments about what was done well or needs improvement, leave a review. Please try be thoughtful and specific. Keep in mind that I still haven't worked out all that needs fixing so it's still pretty rough around the edges. Do I really have to pretty up my story with a picture? Is that really necessary? I always thought it'd be best to let the writing to speak for itself, but people seem to devote a lot of attention to picking what hipster photograph they should use for their posts. I guess I'm jumping on the bandwagon. (I've been using a lot of cliches today, haven't I.)

Reviews

[Barclay H. Berg Jr.]

No names or descriptions of the main characters? You have some nerve calling my piece lame. You talk like an old man I once knew. Maybe that is why you did such an inept job trying to describe things from a woman's point of view.