She’s beautiful, I want to tell them. I know her name, and that’s all I know, seen her in this place or that, but she is beautiful, as if that single word that I use to describe her can somehow explain everything and make them agree with me.

I want to pick her up by her tiny, delicate waist, so strangely alluring to me in ways I can’t comprehend, and hear her laugh and scream for me to let her down, that I am such an idiot for dancing like a fool with her in public, but I laugh along with her, companions in shared delight, until we run out of breath and finally I let her heeled feet touch ground again, two soft tiny taps that meld together which she punctuates with a punch to my arm.

But she smiles, brushes her messy hair back into place, and for a moment our eyes meet and we breathe in unison. It’s perfect. As if in that point of time we collided, softly, like a leaf falling on the surface of a lake, and we were the ensuing ripple that spread, then vanished, but continued, in an ever widening circle, unseen and inaudible, to eventually brush the shores surrounding the water.

I want to reach out and run my hand down her face, slowly, with all deliberation and tenderness, to show her that my big hands are not always so clumsy, but also capable of touching, of holding, her with every hint of gentleness. That my strength is not meant for harm but to fight and protect on her behalf, that I will cherish and honour her love that I truly do not deserve. I want her close, her breath on my skin, inhale the scent of her hair, and study each line and every soft curve.

She’s beautiful, I want to tell my friends as we sip dark and sweet coffee flavoured with hints of cherry and talk over the noise and bustle of the cafe. Beautiful, but not in the conventional sense, because if you were to separate each one of her features you would, like any other person, find them perfectly unremarkable, like how a wheel apart from a Maserati is only a wheel, but its absence renders the car incomplete and useless (you must understand that I use such analogies in terms that they will understand; a necessary evil, if you will).

But I can’t find the moment where I can tell them all of this, even though I feel that I must say something in order for all these thoughts swimming within to find some basis in reality, but as each minute passes the opportunity continues to elude me until it is finally out of reach. We skim through topics like games, office shenanigans, politics, or friends we have not seen in years, and we laugh and banter like we always have, but we are wary still. Careful not to let on more than what we have underneath our skin.

We can’t talk about the beautiful women whom we have hurt or have hurt us, or let the pain creep across our faces and reach our eyes for the rest of us to see. If it does happen, in our weaker moments before we can catch ourselves, it is always fleeting, and we let it slide, we forgive our brother for that social indiscretion and the ensuing awkward discomfort, and we allow the words “she left me for someone else”, or “I can’t sleep at night for thinking of her”, to trickle into a deep dark well where the light cannot reach, where we will not cast down any means to bring it to surface again, before we let the brief silence to reign in a gesture of wordless understanding.

But in spite of this, we want this pain to mean something, like somehow that crack spidering across the surface of that pink fist-sized muscle, heartbreak in slow motion, is pointing to some deeper purpose that you have no hindsight yet to say that “Yes, that is where it all started”, that it was at that point in your life that everything changed, that things became different from that point onwards, that you are stronger and more resilient because of it, and you look back, years later, full of wisdom and experience and feeling that you, now in the skin of your future self, know better.

Know that the pain was somehow, in its own inscrutable and undefinable way, worth all the tears. And so were the voiceless, lonely nights and the endless replaying of disappointments and carefully pent-up anguish. You want it to matter, to make a difference, to make a significant spike in the graphical representation of your life and create that proverbial fork in the road leading to where the pastures are more green and the fields always golden.

To believe that love is real and that it exists and that the future belongs to us, not because we will change it, but because we want it to change for us, into the dreams we spun during the heady days of our youth and the promises whispered in silence and darkness. And all that pain, while not completely forgotten, is distant, an intentional faint blur in the horizon, that lingers not because we cling helplessly to it, but left in the recesses of our memory to remind us that our moments of happiness and joy are so much the sweeter for it.

- excerpt from Something That Does Not Yet Exist, entitled ‘Silence’.

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Been duly impressed by RoE’s writing style and this post is a tribute/blatant ripoff/acoustic YouTube cover of it.

edit: This is pure fiction, by the way. Just had to make that clear.