Not-talking, not being with, those who breathed life into us, in whose imagination we reside permanently, is a journey which wrenches, threatening full-time to keep us in childhood memories and meanderings. Justifying why we do not talk, trying to redo memories, as if their correcting in today’s thinking will update the actuality, like plastic surgeons uplifting the faces of age and antiquity.

Not-talking because talk is impossible; because the words which would be loving turn too easily into threats; wishes to please, to hold, to be with, fall outside of immediacy into some abyss…where terror resides, lurking; its cheshire-cat leer preparing to pounce upon any momentary weakness perceived.

Not-talking, now the resolve of life weakened into last words. Talk, not-talk, now altered into the what-would-have-been. Talk, the might-have-been, battling at last to come into today, so we can all breathe the same air, unpolluted by the burdens of not-talking…