Is Silence your way of speaking?

 

New York, August heat,  

and your silence  

like a room I keep entering  

expecting you to be there.

 

Three times I have written—  

postcards, small attempts at crossing  

whatever distance you’ve decided  

not to name.  

Nothing returns.  

Not even an echo.

 

So I invent you.

 

You are in another life now,  

leaning toward someone else,  

learning the shape of his name  

the way you once learned mine.  

I tell myself this gently,  

as if it were kindness.

 

I have undone what remained—  

cut loose the almost-love,  

the unnecessary tenderness  

I offered where I felt nothing.  

There is only you now,  

even in your absence.

 

Tell me—  

is silence your way of speaking?  

Do you mean for it to wound,  

or has something simply been lost,  

a letter, a moment,  

the thin thread that held me to you?

 

I think of you constantly.  

It has become a kind of occupation.  

Even the city—  

all its noise, its vertical insistence—  

cannot interrupt  

this quiet persistence of you.

 

I will leave on the first of September.  

Will you be in Madrid?  

There is still, somewhere in me,  

the fragile architecture of a month  

in which we might have been happy.

 

But I am learning  

how hope thins.

 

If you are not there,  

if you do not write,  

I will understand—  

or try to.  

I will not make a scene of it.  

You know how I hate  

the spectacle of breaking.

 

Still, say something.  

Anything.  

Even the smallest truth  

hurts less than this  

unanswered space.

 

At the airport you said:  

“I’m used to you.”  

I have turned that over and over—  

like a coin worn smooth—  

wondering if that was ever love,  

or only habit  

mistaken for it.

 

You did not cry.  

I did enough for both of us.

 

Everything ends, I suppose.  

Even this—  

this insistence,  

this refusal to let go  

without a word.

 

You were more to me  

than anyone.  

That is the simplest way to say it,  

and the most difficult to undo.

 

If there is anything left—  

not love, not even that—  

write to me.

 

I need it.

 

Because I must begin, somehow,  

to live  

sin tí…