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It's as if the words are stuck in my stomach. "Stuck" is the wrong word. Maybe they're asleep in there...resting, dreaming of being something better than what they are... it's not painful, this silence...it simply is.

It's easier to be silent now, than to compile the hurt, the anger, the disappointment, the shame into words. I'd rather just listen, absorb, zombify for a while... pretend to be an active listener. "Pretend" isn't the right word, either.

The truth is, I'm a horrible listener. But when I'm most introspective, most lost in the mucky mildew of my mind, I find myself fascinated with the words that fall from other peoples' mouths. I'm a better listener when I can't bear to hear the thoughts tumbling around in the dryer drum of my head.

When the screeching, finger-pointing madness is too much, I rely on others to fill my ears with anything but. People rarely come through, though, you know.

They hear that silence, and they probe into it. "What's wrong?" "You okay?" "You seem down today?" They stop talking because I stop talking, when what I need... what I would carve my ear canals as open as I could to hear... are the trivial stories of their dum-drum lives. How my co-worker's nauseous because she hasn't taken a crap in 3 days... How my mother got a phone call from her friend who's so doped up she fell asleep on the phone...

But people only share that kind of shit when you don't want to hear it.

When you need it...when you need them and their fucked up little lives to fill the dangerous spiney voids in your swirling churning head - they abandon you then. They leave you with those thoughts they would never believe you have...things too ugly, misshapen and vomitous to share... things they'd never want to hear, they leave you alone with those things.

And tomorrow they'll ask if I'm feeling better, so they can go back to their noisy nonsense I so badly needed.