I hate the silence of waiting

My mind fumbling over the cold phone that sits on my desk

Untouched, unused, understood as our only connection

I’m the first passenger on this train

The first to step on, saying, “Let’s go!”

A wide-eyed grinning toddler playing with toy cars

Truly believing they’ll move like the real ones

Your voice, muffled, steps on after me

Forgetting, purposefully, maybe, your luggage of thoughts

Packed to the brink, yet refusing

To explode in my face

I wouldn’t really mind, though

We sit back to back, looking, not seeing

Hearing, not listening

“Being” as the other “is”

As we “are”

Alone

The silence lives for minutes

It crawls into my ears, relentlessly scraping out the earwax

Using it to cover itself back up, refusing to

It drowns out all light, possibility falls into its abyss

It’s a silence I don’t want to believe in

For, I think

Only when I believe in it, like fairytales, it will be true

I turn around to a faded off-white gray of a ghost

Hovering beside the provocative window

Why should I try to preserve you

What good are you to me now?

I think to myself in a voice you’ll never hear

Yet you won’t go

Why must it be up to me

To let you

Now tell me,

What kind of love houses opaque drowning ghosts

One train stop away from disappearing in the silent wind