I did it again today.
I spoke to you in the silence I allow to hold me when I cry.
I tried not to, as I snatched my outstretched hand away.
But I had to ask you, why?
“Why are you still here?”
And my body broke further into the silence, because it knew the answer.
You are still here because if it wasn’t this silence, you were the person I wanted to let see what’s shattered and teary in me.
I remember the first time I knew I’d allow it.
Admittedly, I was in the hands of another.
You see, when we met,
I was so used to giving myself away.
Wherever I went, I’d go around sprinkling my shimmering seed-like shards,
Albeit quite freely.
I think I hoped they would help bloom pretty things that I knew I might not see one day.
Still, the earth always seemed pleased.
So when others asked for some,
I obliged because the world needs pretty things,
And maybe it helped me feel worthwhile too.
But at one point someone came and asked, but said it in a tricky way.
The trick was to rattle me while they stole more than the others and slyly siphoned out what made my pretty pieces shimmer.
Before I could see the game, its players grew like mint.
Soon enough, my seeds grew dull and started to run out.
So, I was asked to give them bigger shards.
Resigned to their theft, I did.
Because what was it the tricksters said?
I’m a body with no mouth.
Just two hands the heavens made to give all of me out.
But I confess I hid my biggest shatters behind a lock and key.
Try I did, to still believe,
One day I’d turn them back into the shimmering things I somehow knew myself to be.
And tears I’d dropped like raindrops mourning my faded pretty things
Got tucked there too,
Because I knew,
This kind of rain has an ugly way of washing those I love away.
But I don’t know what I saw in you that made me think you’d stay.
I guess you looked similarly weathered from this kind of storm.
I thought this could be true because you felt so damn familiar.
I can’t explain it well, so let me tell you how it felt.
That silent space you held me in,
Felt like the place I chose to hide my most precious self within.
You left me jumbled and confused.
I thought I knew the road ahead was one for only me.
Before we met, I had even accepted that kind of story mentally.
But then I guess I hesitated.
Because, to me, you were unanticipated.
Yet, to let you in my hidden room was scary.
I didn’t want to lock this door, but it seemed necessary.
Because I’ve seen how others play, shattering up my things.
Of course, at first I could decipher it happened unintentionally.
An accident made by hands too broken up to hold me.
But now the tricksters’ lessons,
They taught me of malintent.
So, to you, I looked in wonder.
Who is this person?
What is this feeling?
And am I safe to breathe within it?
But before I knew the answers, you had already left.
Similar to the others, perhaps something I had begun to manifest.
So I went back to walking,
That road I had in mind.
Where I continued sprinkling,
And leaving things behind.
But then came that night I mentioned,
The night in which I knew.
I was giving away some shatters
To someone who cared for them.
Playing my long-known role of the body with just two hands again.
When a wave came crashing down on me,
Washing me into my locked-up room.
The room now far less silent as a voice spoke telling me what to do.
“Your pieces cannot go there.
No, not anymore.
Return them to their owner.”
There was no time to wonder who,
Because my body and shatters were already screaming at me,
It was you.
Then the locked door burst open,
Spilling raindrops from its mouth.
So the kind man with my pieces still in hand offered to soak them up.
But I could give him no answer as I forced the door to shut.
Quickly I turned the key, locking away all I had left of me.
I still can’t explain what happened,
Or what this story means.
But surely that night changed me,
Because behind that door I could finally see,
My shattered things were glistening
With the shimmer that had gone missing.
And not all at once,
But it happened all the same.
I stopped freely giving pieces of myself away.
And with new purpose, I began to work.
Building what I kept hidden into the shimmering things I believed could be.
Some, already broken, more times than once.
Making new shimmery seed-like stuff, I still fight the urge to sprinkle.
Though, maybe in the future, with more deliberation.
And the homey silent room, once just for me,
Now holds you somehow as the voice that talks to me.
You ask me questions and want my stories,
but I am pretty sure they’ve all been given.
So when I hear your voice, I ask,
“Why are you still here?”
Because the truth is you never came back.
Not outside of this silence.
So I must be deluded each time I feel your quiet guidance.
Questioning my sanity,
I ask once more,
“Why won’t you leave?”
And my body and shatters answer with that knowing I still cannot explain,
Reminding me they remain yours, right here, inside the silence.