My Name is Delilah

Words Unspoken

The sky is black like ink. It runs across the night slowly dripping down onto the earth leaving pools behind for me to slip into. The stars are pinpricks of light spreading like a beautiful disease creating a sort of chaos. Is there something beautiful about sadness? My understanding is not vast like the universe but can be easily contained in something as small as a pickle jar. That is what I think when I first see Nyle his hands dancing in front of him creating patterns and shapes. A language void of spoken words but beautiful in a way that isn't always easy to understand.

I spend days looking up signs across the internet scouring books to double check my findings. I am nervous to be wrong, but it's best to try and be wrong than to never try at all. The first time we speak my fingers are clumsy and slow. My sentences disjointed and broken. He smiles at me nodding along while following my chaotic signs and slipping tongue. He takes time with me helping me decipher his language and trying to understand my words.

For weeks our conversations are limited to written notes and simple signing, but Nyle helps quicken my fingers and quiet my voice. With time, we talk using his language leaving mine behind. Learning not only a new way to communicate but also a new way to love. Soon hands no longer move in the air but clasp each other. Fingers lacing through fingers. Lips finding each other in the silence. We become each other's air. Our only way to breath.

My day and my night become one, and I can no longer see pass what's right in front of me. Falling in love is like slipping into one of those pools of black. It's trusting that whatever is on the other side will catch you and keep you whole. My heart is in the palm of my hand. I'm holding it out either for it to be taken gently or crushed.

When I give it to him, Nyle takes it slowly examining it like he's looking for flaws. His eyes scan its cracks and crevices as he slowly turns it around in the palm of his hand. Bringing it so close to his face, his dark eyelashes brush its surface, he breaths on it. His breath coats its sticky surface as he gazes back up at my face. His teeth are white like the sand on a beach when the sun dances across it, and he smiles at me before slowly placing my heat in the pocket of his shirt close to his own.

As the months go by, we become one. A ring slipped on a finger, vows shared and exchanged, a lease signed, sealed, and delivered. Our shelves clutter up with mementos of separate pasts along with freshly printed photographs. We paint the walls of our new life bright colors like the ones found in the sky just before sunset. Dark purple and golden orange. We share these things along with ourselves. Secrets whispered in the dark under cool sheets and moonlight.

Years pass, and we stand together now lost in time and space, but it's like I'm walking up the down slide. I keep slipping back tripping again and again my feet unsteady beneath me. My hands become crumpled and bent unable to say what I need them to. Lips that once found each other now yell and mouth things they should never try to say. Hands that once held each other tight now create black and blue bruises on bleeding hearts.My heart has been breaking for you for half my life.

Decades slipping by unnoticed like the ticking of a clock, and my pickle jar has grown the size increasing to that of a freshly made jug. Made with rough tan hands that were patient with their work, they slowly form the clay into something new. Someone who could understand anything outside of her small world. But I still find myself looking to the sky every now and again hoping to find peace there. Hoping to slip into that void. Wishing that the ink would spread across my skin, so I could disappear into the nothing, but he's always there to pull me back spelling out with his hands what I sometimes forget. My name is Delilah, and I cannot find what I'm looking for in the vastness of the universe, but instead, it's in the pocket of a boy who talks with his hands and speaks from his soul.