Twenty-Eight: Simple Thoughts.
“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
-Michael Ondaatje
We were suddenly together all the time. Every possible moment saw not just you, or me, but us, the two of us. We were synonymous, and the act of togetherness was just as wondrously natural as breathing.
I never expected someone like you to ever happen to me. When I first saw you, I didn't think that one day, we'd be spending a Friday evening blasting music in my living room, with you writing and me reading the stories you'd spun for me. Yet there we were, lit by the lambent glow of the remaining Christmas lights.
You were using your netbook, and the keys clicked quietly beneath your fingertips. Though the back of the computer was facing me, I could imagine your pink painted nails ghosting over the keyboard. The letters were faded from too much typing, and some keys held the smudgy remains of fingerprints. It was just another mark you'd left on another little thing.
In the darkened hallway, the bluish light of the TV screen in my aunt and uncle's room sent flickering streaks onto the walls. It spilled out into the living room, too, and drifted over your careful handwriting on the lined notebook pages.
Reading your journal had given me yet another reason to be amazed by you, because I realized more with every page that you really could write. Your writing went deeper than paragraphs or sentences or even words—every letter was a treasure, and I didn't know how you managed it but you did, and it was powerful.
You'd smile at me every now and then over the tops of your knees, blushing, and I knew that sharing the words on these pages was hard for you, almost too hard. But you'd done it anyway, you'd taken leaps like I had taken leaps, except your leap caught air and now you were soaring.
We didn't talk much that day; we didn't have too. The words were there in front of us, and all we had to do was breath to catch a taste of them. They were on paper, onscreen, but they were also in our minds and in the air. I watched you pluck them lithely from the sky with a simple smile or narrowed eye. The magic of your discoveries reflected onto your features, making them shine.
I sat on one side of the couch and you occupied the other, with endless tightropes of words stretched out between us. But they were not partitions, they were swirling bridges of ink and emotion, and we swung across them like they were monkey bars in a playground. They were soundless, and this was all the better because it left us with incredible space. A word in silence has even more strength than a word in sound, because the blankness leaves so much room for dauntless interpretation.
And even though I loved it when we spoke, our words in silence lit the house and brought the ceiling sagging down to join us. I'd never felt more powerful than I did in those simple moments on that simple day, when our eyes would meet and you would smile, just for a moment, before we both returned to our words. Mine, written. Yours, waiting to be written.
A simple thought: sometimes, the written word carries more life than the spoken word.
A simple truth: often, it is the simplest thoughts that are the most invincible.
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A/N: i think this is probably my favorite prompt so far, short as it is.
also, guys, there's only a few days left in december. i'm not readdyyyy :( i actually really love sam and ellery, i feel like i'll end up writing them into something else one day.
also, i see you guys have been wondering about ship namessss. i think the main two are sellery and samery. tbh, i don't have a preference, so just...whatever you guys want to call them is perfectly all right with me,
