When you come to the final impasse, it will signal you with a beacon flashing green and yellow in succession, two then one, then two, then one. There is no way to sustain a deadlock. To deny where the ship must needs sail is to see it founder on the accusing rocks.
The enjoyment we sifted until only the net remained. The tears have long since been washed away by the hope of something yet to come. Skeins of memory. These things we stow like old broken toys, or a wishbone snapped at the neck.
The face changes. God help you if it has regained the luster not seen since early days. This comes to some through release, and then for you the pain is keener. In the opposite case, your guilt compounds, warranted or not, you will taste blood.
My rock to your scissor. The debates reduced to circular quarrels, each like the bead of a rosary, the sound drifting upwards, acrimonious like pungent incense, advancing towards the futile rather than the redemptive. Their centrifugal force pulling asunder what might have been a parting in good faith.
Perhaps a wall was thrown up. It would have been impenetrable and unscalable, cutting off one from the other, starving both. For nothing can thrive in that arid place and time, away from the fluid in which love was birthed. And words of love die, blossoms that fall as they are born. Simple humane gestures are rebuffed.
The breaking is protracted or it is sudden. Numbness follows in either case.
We are not equipped to withstand these foot pounds of emotional pressure.
To feel again is time's flowering, a bud whose chemistry will articulate its perfect need. And in this state of renewal, the time of mourning will be put to rest.
But for now there is still a fundamental emptying of these rooms to see to. The cries and sobs have stuck to the surfaces as a residue of this living deficit. We will welcome the morning. It arrives with jocular men who will neatly paint over the sounds of our greatest dramas. The walls will be as blank and smooth as a white lie.
And so the book of hours closes.
We will be as opaque to each other as the day we met, and the pages, which were written in an ink not meant to last, will be fresh like new sheets on a bed, made to record anew the secrets of our hearts.