October chills.Autumnal aches.

Why is this the perfect temperature to inspire melancholic remembrance?

He engraved hieroglyphic silences all over the marble seats of my worship - bold, curving, and mysterious. What was I trying to decipher from the carved tablets of his inoffensive silence? A faded past? A coded instruction? A map leading me to forbidden treasures? Or a sacred truth? I wish I hadn't set out to learn the alphabet of his silence.

I tossed my words reverently into his beautiful muteness, watching those hopeful coins sink into that wishing well, spreading smiling ripples across his face. His shoulders retrenched my emotional landslides as my constricted sobs bounced away harmlessly from his padded silence. Word and tears were infinitely more pleasurable in his arms, when his fingers planted tousled forests in my hair while uprooting tangles of nightmarish weeds from my consciousness and dried my dripping nose while moistening my scalded soul.

His forays into the language of my solitude were stumbling yet successful, hesitant yet happy, desperate yet delightful. The wonder of hearing his alien tongue traverse the scores of my favourite mental melodies endeared them to me more than anything else could have. Those words melded more harmoniously with his roughened lips did than my lips ever did. Our wrong-footed kisses shattered ancient curse-laden seals to unloose pestilential beings that escaped through his mouth to plague my memory to eternity.

And the jarring notes…
His laughter that rose nervously in a wheezy titter, like a bawdy joke ascending to a coarse crescendo.
Mouthfuls that vanished in rude gulps as he cast furtive looks around like a rat hurriedly nibbling away at stolen food
Those barbaric notes that clashed cacophonically with mellifluous background score of his silence whenever we warred in our common tongue of rhetoric.
They battered the door that kept us locked within the delusive bliss of an x-ray lab, as it churned out chronicles of chronic fractures in our transient tenderness. But the noisy intruder was knocking savagely from within the room, not outside.
When all the casts were removed the skeletal frame of our intimacy collapsed. I was semantically adrift, I, who’d read his silences better than his speeches. Futile was my makeshift dictionary of his silences when his simplest utterances eluded translation. Did I lip-read in the darkness that smouldered angrily, darkly, icily with the warnings he mouthed in despair?
Did I throw away those parchments in a spasm of blank exasperation, that prophetic script of tragedy inked in a potion of invisibility?
His fingers had stiffened into a coiled fist within my clasp, a snake arching its muscles into a tight bow before striking. Had they been free, they would have formed a fortification around his ears, barring auditory gates of attack from my voice. A child's instinctive strategy to soundproof himself to admonitory words.
His eyes pulled down shutters in a silent bandh against the incursion that his ears suffered.
He looked away when I said, "I love you."