The ardent conversationalist

The dreaded silence.
His turn to listen now.
To wait out the silence, to take words in.

Silence he knows won't go away.
For a moment there's that image, that ephemeral hope that he has finally deciphered the silences but he knows, as he always knows, everything is still the same.

Bleeding words as he searches himself for a silence, squirming about in the anarchy of the lull, he knows, he knows the futility only too well. Traipsing aimlessly through time seeking to create more of it, crumbling in the uncertainty of the wordlessness only to realise that he is condemned to forever drown in the pool of words that punctuates his thoughts and his silence, he knows. It is easier to make words than to wait for them to return.

"Talk, my dear, talk", he exhorts eloquently, "being silent is one of those resounding crimes in life."

The joy of bending words to terpsichorean whims, of weaving thoughts into their substance, of pouring life into them in sentences, of letting them out into a silence and embellishing it with the beauty of the spoken word... The pride, and the pleasure, they all tell him the same thing, that one simple yet undeniable truth that words are heavier than silence.

To spiral through days, to find revelations in daily greetings, to elicit love from windy windows, to plant memories inside conversations, to thrive on moments stolen from words and words stolen from moments, isn't that what time merits from its remorseless assassins? The sound of a word escaping the lips, isn't that what true beauty aspires to? To say a word and receive another in return, isn't this bartering of the most basic of emotions the greatest thing about being human?

Forced to curtail the irrepressible flow of words and left to lament the tyranny of time, burning up in solitude and silence and sweating to contain these words inside him, he asks himself, did it have to be so hard?

Like standing at the centre of a paper-thin glacier. Like groping about the walls of a dark room, searching for a switch to illuminate the darkness. Like screaming into a ravaging tornado.

But he knows, all that he knows, he knows because he's had the luxury of silences, of silences understanding enough to let him digest his words, words which wouldn't be what they were if it wasn't for the existence of the silences they broke.

Silences hushing words, words ripping silences apart, silences in words, words in silences... Silences and words, those two strange bedfellows, incessantly at argument, always driving each other apart yet forever in the throes of one another, possessors of strangely intertwined destinies.

For now, he is the ardent conversationalist and he shall play his part.
To just sit there and wait for the words to return. One after the other.
And patiently wait until there shall be no words left to wait for anymore.