Exhale

I am listening to the Silence of a crowded room, and wondering why the woman in the corner stares at her shoes (as if they contained the answers to the world).

When voices fill this space it's like walking into a vacuum, where my eardrums are sucked out through my chest (grotesque) and the thudding of my heart rings in the back of my eyes.

Meanwhile the fountain (in the corner) murmurs beside the woman as she watches her shoes, occasionally shifting her gaze to the trickle of the water, as if it's whispering secrets (to her feet).

I wonder, as I watch her, if she can hear it, too: the buzz of the vacuum beneath the hum of the voices that fill this crowded room.

I am feeling (typical) as if the vacuum has affixed itself to my chest and tugs its pulling--searching, I think, for something to pop out.

and when the nearly-familiar Voice whispers at dawn that He is waiting, I shudder because I am afraid that He will see me, in the woman, in the corner, beside the fountain, waiting for answers from my toes.

I push the vacuum against my forehead and strain for the answers, for the something, to sneak past the Silence

beneath the voices in

my crowded room.