Silence shouldn’t have a weight.

It is a sound—or the absence of it. And yet, more often than not, silence is heavier than anything one could ever attempt to hold. But silence is not something that one can simply drop, like any other heavy load. Even if broken by sound (—the crashing waves, the keening gulls—) the phantom weight lingers on the ears, the mind, the soul. The absence of sound unfilled with words that could (or should) have been spoken; things one wished to say—or wished to know to say.

But it isn’t. It is left empty and oppressive for the elephant and dove to accept and carry.

Black rimmed ears tilt back, as silence stretched; but his navy gaze does not waver from his probing stare into her coral eyes. Until she speaks, “Jalala.” His ears swing forward as she speaks a language he does not know. His face remains blank save for a crease of the thin, black skin around his dark eyes and a slight purse of his lips. She left—he had not seen her in seasons—and the first thing she says to him is in another language? Something he cannot possibly understand?

The Elephant is surprised at the trickle of coldness that pools in his chest in response to her word. Rather, he is surprised that, after not seeing Orithia (not knowing if she was alive, safe, or had succumbed to her own demons) that this is her greeting and this is his reaction to it: coolness. So he, still shouldering its unbearable weight, remains silent.

“I learned that I am no broken dove to be coddled and cured by a man fascinated by fixing things.”

And it must not be enough for the dove to stop at chilling his chest (—her influence runs so much deeper than that) because with these words his thick hide twitches at the sickness that fills his barrel. His jaw clenches slightly, navy eyes blinking slowly; and, as the black lids rise, his gaze is cast to the shells tumbled by waves rushing on the shore. The shells’ small worlds heaved and upended by a force larger than they could ever conceive.

Perhaps if the shells could grasp the immensity of the ocean (if darkening cobalt eyes could look at the breaking, blushed face), then they might accept the toppling of their world (he might understand that this was a necessary pain).

But they didn’t.

”I cannot be one of your many.” This is a declaration, different than the soft, but devastating, blows from before. And her avowal continues, peppering his hide with shrapnel as it twitches when particularly repulsive sentiments hit him: ”I do not exist for your pleasure”; ”I am not a notch in your belt”; ”I am not your pet project”. His ears twitch as they hear the sharp slap of her tail against her flanks. It is a sound, combined with the rustling feathers that marked the rise of her wings, that resonates in his ears at the meaning behind the motion (fear).

And the Elephant’s mind, begins to close her off. In some sort of self defense against the onslaught of pain (because truths provide the most excruciating pains). And his heart, floundering amid churning tides of pain, hurt, and anger, pounds a rhythm against his ears and behind his dark, creased eyes. And, even after she finishes speaking words that drip in her own pain (drops that add deluges to his own tides)—it was strange, to have this sensation of drowning when all things in the Elephant were usually filled with heat and fire.

And so, beneath this flood, his low voice begins to speak on its own accord. Hoarse and deep and hitching only once (on a word that means so much to the man), “You had no right to send her away. A woman with my children in her—a woman I love, and who has given me the chance to show that love. And has forgiven that love, for all its faults and flaws. Not abandon or throw it to the wind when it was broken—as I did not throw you—“ and his voice finally breaks and fell silent. That heavy, heavy silence.

Still, his gaze does not meet hers. (It is too filled with the sights of their last encounter—filled with promise and acceptance and hope.) Though his breaths are deep, chest expanding full as if to supply oxygen against the flood that threatens to engulf him. Dark eyes stare, unseeing at the turbulent waves as they broke over far-off rocks. Ears are tilted back, almost quivering against the suppressed anger which had, thus far, been held in check by the wounds of her words.

But a particularly large wave crashes over the rocks and navy suddenly flares and swings to blushed rose. His head rose slightly, neck hardening beneath the defiant insults she had thrown at him. “I am glad you can so easily choose to not be hurt. I cannot claim the same; perhaps because, even though I ‘cannot give everything’ —I have lost too much for that— what I have given was true and deep and honest. I never wanted to play god, Orithia,” he uses her name for, as she said, she no longer was a broken dove—not longer his dove, “I wanted only to give you love when you had none.”

And, again, heavy silence.

Tembovu & Orithia

an Elephant and his Dove