We move in silence.
I whistle along to the tune in my mind like the breeze over granite-coloured water – the sea air washing through my head alone, salting each thought. You say nothing. You never do. You just stare at the horizon, dumbfounded. Only you could be dumbfounded by the simplicity of a straight line. We sit like this in British Expeditionary Force uniforms – me cradling spheres and your mind grasping at lines, each surveying the idioms that once were our battlefield, bobbing like survivors in the sea.
Somewhere else unheard, unreal, we catch the coarse sounds of the fishing boats returning to harbour – the sharp clunk of lobster pots spilling their fresh catches, the hacking glottal wheezes of white bearded sea-dwellers in yellow oilskin, leather-faced from a diet of saline air, tobacco and rust.
You notice as the world distracts me – enchants me from my unheard song, lures me from your unwatched horizon, anchoring me crudely to one sphere amongst many. None of this is real.
“What was that?” you ask, indignant that the world now snares me so much more easily than fantasy.
“That was trust,” I reply. “Trust like a kid looking up, wide-eyed – wide-eyed but not shielding their eyes from the sun.”
But you don’t understand. You don’t know what a child is because you never left childhood behind. You sigh, or maybe it is me, and watch the marbles in my hand as I stare hard at your distant line. We acknowledge abeyance with a nod. We have to find common ground. Here, on the sand.
So we build a fort upon No Man’s Land and declare war on the sea instead, holding hands with unclutched swords and flying an invisible banner above. Our banner, crafted by our own hands, stained with our own blood. We watch it dance in the wind, deep red spasms against endless cloudless blue, neither of us shielding our eyes from its glare.
We watch it move in silence.

• This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.