Talk is Cheap

They rested, celebrated, found each other all over again in a cheap motel room that seemed as surprised in the hues of pink and magenta of their shadows.

She leaned closer to the side of the bed, lazy with the darkness looming in the curtains of the room. He was spinning verbal menageries like the spider on the corner with its cobwebs of reason and imaginations. The words swirled with their cigarette smoke, dissolving in the rings of air, humidity and underlying innuendos, dancing across the hazy air like a perched dancer on an invisible boulevard.

He had been away all weekend and most of the time that spanned through it; she felt like she would burst in her own bubble of solitude and loneliness of chaos in her head. And now she sat here watching his theatrical montage of words and smoke mixing together.

He speaks in turquoise, cerulean, yellows… whiskey amber, and delectable embellishment, each breath laced with nicotine and lucid dreams. Every day is a void canvas and a new paint-brush of dynamite; somehow the paint always drips, and he lights the fire in her head, each day every day.

For him, it was not a matter of a ploy, or for his own catharsis. He was his own character, poised, comic, tragic and poignant, all at the same time… he is words with wonder coated in a fabulous thin candy shell.

And he has this lousy habit of making people fall in love with him.

He didn’t know about the weekend she’d had. He did not know that she had just lost her Enzo, her dog , her companion and the car was a reckless thing on that lousy Sunday Morning. Enzo was a hyperactive silly dog running across the streets, chasing squirrels dropping from the fall trees .All it took was a screech to bring her perfect world to an end.

He didn’t know how she thought she might be going crazy. How she had read that dogs are the best friends and people mourn their dog’s death more than the death of their peers or folks. How she had not eaten well ever since and was clinging on to her shards of reasoning, failed and discarded.

There was a quiet moment. Not an awkward silence – with him, these did not exist. The fan was louder than it seemed with chaos in her head. He stared quietly into the distance like he was tapping onto his thoughts from a distance, like he was thinking about something way smarter than anything she could ever understand. It was nice, this silence. And then he turned to her, out of nowhere, and said

“Look at you. You’re writhing in the crushing grip of reason.”

And he was right.

She hadn’t told him a damn thing, and he was right. He had a way of saying it that made it sound bigger than everything else in the room. He had an understanding that dissolved in the smoke of his cigarette, like he was not one of those making a mockery of their own words, like he understood that Enzo was gone and she never would play with him again. Like he was joking but he was not.

“So how do you suppose that it was so?”

She continued chasing the smoke clouds in her head and squirmed. There was no need to say anything further. He knew already.

He knew how scared she was.

What good is a conversation when the words have already been spoken in your minds?

It’s a huge waste of space. That’s what it is.