Many Words In Silence

Chapter 16

“I didn’t think you were going to be away this long,” Timothy said as I walked into the hotel room. I frowned at him before I checked my watch. It was close to midnight.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping already?” I asked him. I felt annoyed with him even if it wasn’t his fault that I was annoyed.

“How was your date? Did you kiss him?” Timothy asked, raising one eyebrow and looking cute and jealous all at the same time.

“Why are you asking? Jealous?” I said as I took of my coat and hung it over the nearest chair.

“Maybe,” Timothy said as he stood up from the couch, turning down the volume on whatever he was listening too.

“Don’t start with me please. I really didn’t have the best night in the world and I need a shower,” I answered as I walked past him and into the bedroom, starting to go through the bags of clothes still standing on the ground, looking for pyjamas and clean underwear.

“I only waited up for you because I was worried about you being out so late with someone you don’t even know,” Timothy said. He had obviously followed me into the room.

“You can’t be worried about someone you don’t even know,” I mumbled, walking into the bathroom.

“Then what the hell am I doing here?” he asked as I closed the door in his face and turned open the shower taps.

As the water started pouring down and I stripped out of my clothing I could not help but wonder about what Timothy had to say. Could you really care and worry about someone you had only just met? Do we care just because that is something that ‘good’ people do, or can you actually make an immediate connection to someone when you meet them the very first time? Was it not just lust, instead of falling in love? Did I care for Blake the moment I met him? Did I actually truly care at the end? Were we together long enough for me to have really called it love? Was it still love or just obsession?

Fynn took me to the place where Blake used to play, and on the one hand I enjoyed hearing the story of when they both fell off the jungle gym and skinned their knees. I liked the story of how Blake used to tie a towel around his neck and pretend that he was Superman, coming to save this broken world from itself. It sounded like the Blake I knew, but I could not picture it as my Blake; the one I knew. These memories of Blake would never be mine, because I was never a part of it. It would always belong to someone else. Someone different.

As I washed the evening I have had from my body with warm water and soap, hoping that the longing I still felt for Blake would be washed away like bacteria from my body, I could not help but hear a song. It seemed far away but the lyrics emitted from the woman’s voice felt like it was cutting right through my body.

And they all pretend they're Orphans

And their memory's like a train

You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away

And the things you can't remember

Tell the things you can't forget that

History puts a saint in every dream

Well she said she'd stick around

Until the bandages came off

But these mamas boys just don't know when to quit

And Matilda asks the sailors are those dreams

Or are those prayers?'

So just close your eyes, son

And this won't hurt a bit

And it's Time Time Time

And it's Time Time Time

And it's Time Time Time

That you love

And it's Time Time Time

I could hear every word and how it related to my life as well. I knew it was Death’s words in the song. Telling about every person’s time and when it will be their time to go. We all have a time. We all have to go at one hour or another, but it is not for us to truly know when. Blake’s time was when we were only sixteen years old. Mine might be when I am eighty-five years old. Who could know when my time will be. She was singing to me. Telling me it was not my time yet. That there was still reasons for me to live here on this plane of difficult and tragic existence, whether I wanted to or not. There was a reason why I could not follow through with suicide. There was still time for me, unlike so many others. But in the time that I am still here, it is also time for me to sit down and think what I want in this life. What is the main reason for being alive? Is it love? Is it all about love? Do we care because of some one-time connection that we make with others, or do we love because of the fact that we are beings made out of love.

I sighed as I climbed out of the shower and pulled a towel around me, not even thinking of drying off. I hated it when things in life became this abstract and philosophical.

“Play that song again,” I said as I opened the bathroom door, dripping water over the carpet as I sped my way to the living room.

“Okay…” Timothy said, a confused frown moving over his face. I could feel his eyes playing over my bare chest. “Why?”

“I don’t know… I just need to listen to that song again. Who sings it?”

“Youtube recommended it to me,” Timothy said. “It seems to be a cover. The woman singing it is named Pri Hollis?”

“Well play it! I don’t need the history. I just need to hear her voice again,” I said as I sat down across from Timothy, still dripping water all over the show and not caring about it at all. I wasn’t even caring that Timothy was the only person apart from Sam that has seen me this naked since Blake’s death.

He pushed a few times on his phone’s screen before Pri’s voice filled the air around me once more. This was not the music I normally listened to. I was used to Panic! At the Disco, My Chemical Romance, and Andy Black. I never deviated from what I normally listened to. But this was different. Where in the past music was a way to express what I was feeling inside, this made me realise a part of myself that I never knew existed. Her voice was so powerful that it felt like an angel inside me has woken up, ready to give me a message I have long been ready for, but didn’t know I needed.

“Play it again,” I said as the song ended.

Although Timothy looked at me with yet another frown on his face he played the song once more. When Pri’s voice finally faded away on the last note I looked Timothy right in the eyes.

“What do you make of the song?” I asked him.

“She’s telling you to love again?” he returned my question with yet another question.

“Maybe… I think she is Death. As in personified. She is reaping people, but she is telling you and me that we still have time. And that we should use that time to love,” I said more to myself than to Timothy.

“What’s going on Elijah?” Timothy asked. “What happened to you tonight?”

“Fynn wants to be with me. He asked me to be with him,” I answered, trying to look past Timothy’s face falling down to the ground.

“So you think that the song is telling you to give him a chance and love him?”

“No… I don’t think so… I have been thinking this whole night… And the song is just confirmation to me in a way. I have been in love with death for a very long time. Ten years ago my boyfriend died. The thing is… Now that I look back… Do I still love him or do I simply love death? Should I rather be loving life?”

“You’re not making sense dude… Seriously,” Timothy said as he walked over to the kitchen, coming back with a glass of water. “I think you need to drink this and just breathe deeply. I don’t think songs are meant to be this literal.”

“I don’t think so either. I just think that sometimes life does give you some signs, and maybe some of them show us that it is time to move on. That you are looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. That maybe it is time to just take your things and live life the way it was meant to be lived; without living in the past,” I tried to explain to Timothy, although I was very sure he wasn’t understand a single word I was saying. I barely understood a single word coming from my mouth.

“So you don’t want to be with Fynn?” Timothy asked, confusion playing over his face as he sat down across from me again.

“No. I don’t like him at all. He is full of himself, egotistical, selfish… The list goes on. I want to find someone who I can have an immediate connection to. Like I had with Blake. But for now I don’t have to think about it at all. For now it’s enough just to know that it is time to move on,” I said, although I think I was speaking more to myself than to him.

“I don’t get it,” Timothy said as I stood up and walked off to the bedroom.

“You won’t… But someday you will,” I answered as I started throwing the little bit of things I own into bags, getting everything together.

“What are you doing?” he asked from behind me as I still stuffed clothing into bags.

“I’m getting ready to go home. I can’t stay here. This place isn’t meant for me. I need to go back to the beginning and do what I should have done a long time ago. I need to start loving again. I need to put the past where it belongs and find someone to love. I have loved death for a very long time. Now I need to love someone who can make me feel alive.”

I was serious in what I was saying. I was hoping that I would break through to Timothy in some way or form. Maybe he would remember this conversation many years from now and not make the mistakes I have made in my life.

Timothy walked up to me. Standing toe to toe with me. For the first time I didn’t see him as just a child. I saw the pain he was carrying around inside of him. I could sense the sadness. Almost as if he ready did understand what I was saying.

“Then love me…” Timothy whispered as he leaned into me, his lips touching mine.

I opened my mouth and allowed his tongue to brush over my lips, allowing him inside a part of me that I never thought I would ever again willingly share with someone. My hands guided themselves to his hips, pressing his body close to mine, fitting us together like two puzzle pieces that had been separated a long time again.

I could feel Timothy’s hands moving up my spine. His fingers curling into my still wet hair. His lips over my lips, moving away just for a second in between to kiss my jawline where I knew a stubble was already forming.

“Timothy…” I gasped as he kissed my neck. “This isn’t right…”

“You said we should love the person we make that immediate connection with, so why shouldn’t I?” Timothy said and his lips was on my willing lips again as we tumbled backward onto the bed.