to find freedom, avelina

[isakov]

throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

How sweet the smile. How placating. How it seems to seize him by the heart and pull, beckoning him even closer. And how willing he goes, content to be strung along by it.

She is warm, it is not hard to tell. Receptive and inviting. Perhaps she will let him rest here awhile. Perhaps she will let him lay an ear to her chest to listen to the heart beating underneath. Perhaps she will let him revel in the magic of being alive.

But, for now, she smiles and he smiles back. There is something slanted about his, boyish. It is indicative of his age, even if the rest of him acts much older. In her, he sees the same glimmer he sees in everyone else. But he still does not know what to make of it. He does not know how to manipulate himself to match it. Not yet.

He exhales a stilted kind of sigh but his smile does not slip as he considers her question. The answer is quite simple, isn’t it? He has never quite known what to make of the silence. And the silence here is different than the silence down by the river, which is punctuated by the rush of the water. It is there that he feels most alive.

“I’m not used to the quiet,” he says, which is neither agreement nor argument. He sidles closer still. He means her no harm, see. See it in the way he smiles? In the bashful way he blinks those pale gold eyes? He is only lonely and he does not know what to make of the quiet.

“Do you like the quiet?” he asks then, “have I disturbed you?”

isakov