No More Words

[Hotel room (1931) by Edward Hopper]

What if there were no words? What if all of this was left unsaid, with just the wind blowing through the leaves and the rustle of something prowling through the undergrowth?

Would anything change?

There are too many unnecessary words in the world as it is. A few more handfuls make no real difference to anything.

We do not need to speak. We do not need to tell each other things we think are true, but in the end turn out to be little more than lies masquerading as hopes and possibilities. We know we have no future to speak of, so we say nothing. We just let the touch of finger against face and the eloquence of skin against skin do all our talking for us.

All those words we have used in the past, to get lovers to take our hands and step out of their normal lives into a place like this, seem overused and meaningless now. A place like this is where the normal rules do not apply and time ceases to pass until see shrug our clothes back on and walk those separate paths back to our own lives without needing to fill the time saying things we know we cannot mean.

We can only ever really say goodbye and mean it, because neither of us knows whether it will really be the last good-bye this time, rather than the acknowledgement that these few stolen hours have only temporarily come to an end.