Say Something

Perhaps it was not that you failed to speak, but that I had already begun listening for the answer I feared, and so that what I remember now as your silence may have been only the sound of my own fear returning to me, altered by distance and by all the years afterward, years which have a way of taking a small thing — a pause, a glance, the closing of a door — and feeding upon it until the thing has become an entire history, until one cannot remember whether the history came from the event or whether the event, remembered often enough, became the history.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Because I would have followed you. I know that much, though even now I do not know what I mean by it, whether I mean that I would have crossed the town and the fields and the dark roads beyond them, or whether I mean something worse, something farther, that I would have followed you into the person I became while trying to remain near you, surrendering one piece and then another until there was almost nothing left but the following itself, the motion without destination, the belief that if I stopped I would have to look behind me and see how far I had come and how little of myself had made the journey.

I’ll be the one, if you want me to

And I was young enough to think that this was courage.

Anywhere, I would’ve followed you

No, not courage. Love.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Or what I called love because I did not yet know the difference between loving someone and needing their answer, between giving yourself and waiting for yourself to be returned, between saying I will follow you and saying please, do not make me go alone.

And I am feeling so small

That was the humiliating truth of it, though I could not say it then, and perhaps cannot say it even now without changing the words and moving them around until they look like something nobler: that I was afraid, that I was small, that the world seemed too large and the future too high above me, and that I mistook my fear of falling for devotion because devotion sounded better, because devotion was something a person could be proud of, whereas fear was merely fear.

It was over my head

So I swallowed my pride, or told myself I did, though pride is not a thing one swallows and finishes with; it remains there, lodged somewhere beneath the heart, and years later it rises again in the middle of an ordinary night, carrying with it the old question: Why did you not say what you needed to say?

I know nothing at all

And there is no answer.

And I will stumble and fall

Or there are too many.

I’m still learning to love

Perhaps you did not know.

Just starting to crawl

Perhaps I did not ask.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Perhaps we were both waiting for the other to become brave first, and because neither of us did, the waiting became the thing itself, until the waiting had lasted so long that neither of us could remember what we had originally been waiting for.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you

I think of that now and wonder whether this is what goodbye really is — not the moment when someone leaves, because leaving is often only movement, a body crossing a threshold, a road taking someone beyond the reach of the window, but the slower thing that comes afterward, when the mind continues to send its old messages into a place where no one receives them, when you wake in the morning and for one instant the old world is still intact, and then memory enters, quietly, almost politely, and takes it away again.

Anywhere, I would’ve followed you

I am sorry.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

There are words that become smaller each time they are spoken, and that is one of them.

And I will swallow my pride

I am sorry I could not reach you.

You’re the one that I love

But perhaps I say that because it is easier than admitting that I did not know where to reach, that I had mistaken the distance between us for something that could be crossed if only I tried hard enough, as though love were a road and effort were the same as direction, as though wanting desperately enough could tell a person where to go.

And I’m saying goodbye

And still there are nights when I imagine that I hear you.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Not your voice exactly, because memory is merciful and cruel in equal measure, but the possibility of it — the shape of a word before it is spoken, the breath before the answer, that little interval in which everything might yet be changed — and I remain there, suspended in it, neither abandoned nor forgiven, neither following nor gone, listening for the thing that perhaps was never said.

And I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you

Until at last I understand, or think I understand, that I cannot spend the rest of my life standing inside that unfinished sentence.

And anywhere, I would’ve followed you

So I let the silence speak for itself.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Not because it has finally told me what I wanted to know, and not because I have become wise enough to call the loss a lesson, but because there comes a time when even grief must relinquish its claim upon the future, when the road behind you can remain a road behind you without becoming a command to turn back, when you can love the person you were with someone and still allow that person to become a stranger, and when you can say goodbye without pretending that goodbye means the wound has closed.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

And if, sometimes, I still listen —

Say something

if sometimes, in the deepest part of the night, when the house has settled and the darkness seems to remember more than I do, I listen for one word from the life that might have been —

Say something

I will not follow it.

Say something, I’m giving up on you

I will let it remain there, beyond the reach of my hands, beyond the road, beyond the years.

Anywhere, I would’ve followed you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2U0Ivkn2Ds