It’s the silence that you pull around you while you check your emails,
the silence that makes a goldfish bowl around you while you sit and knit.
My chatter is a paper aeroplane that hits the glass and falls away, nose bent, wings flopping uselessly.
After a while, the silence reaches for me too;
it’s a fog creeping across the floor and reaching for my ankles, scaring me.
“Are you angry with me?”
Instantly you look up and smile—a snowdrop in the bleak black earth of winter.
No, you say, it’s not you. It’s not you.
And I’m reassured, selfishly reassured,
yet feeling a terrible sadness for that tiny little snowdrop, struggling to flower in the bleak black earth of winter.
