Each Word is Less Than a Moment

All these words that fall across the page like snowflakes settling, like rain falling, like the tears that stain the page when there are no words left and still far too much to say. The words themselves shy away from the page, away from permanence, wanting only to be fleeting moments, there, then lost on the breezes that blow all the possibilities from now away into the unreachable past.

Each word is less than a moment, waiting, heaping up beyond the reach of the hand that could take those waiting words and pin them to the moment. Then spreading them out on this page to say all that needs to be said, before the moment is lost, before the time is gone, before there is nothing left to say.

She sits at the table, pen in hand, watching the tears fall onto the blank page. Next to her unmoving hand are the crumpled balls of discarded pages that didn’t get close to anything she wanted to say. A heap of words that danced around across her mind and over the page, none of them getting close to what she wanted to say, like dancers dancing apart and alone, her thoughts and the words never joined hands, never danced together across the page, creating something new out of all she wanted to say.

Now, there is only silence; a silence and the blank page that waits for her words. Now she knows the page will stay blank because there are far too many words and she had far too much to say for a piece of paper to hold.

So she stands, walks out leaves the empty desk and the blank page and the pen behind as she closes the door on them and dries her tears before walking away.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]