Oh darling, didn’t anyone tell you? I am the Berlin Wall. I am twelve majestic feet of concrete and barbed wire. I am graffitied and broken. I rust in the rain. I am cold and compact. I am eighty-seven files of tightly wound fencing, separating my East from the world’s West. Darling, I’m a concrete compactor. My heart is chained inside of me like a magician performing a trick, imagine a heart restrained in tight wire and locks, mesh fencing and steel cages, sinking into saltwater, that is me, my heart is a failing magician, trapped so deeply inside my trick that it has begun to drown. My hesitance is killing me, dear. Didn’t anyone tell you? Didn’t anyone warn you about my walls and my silence? I am sorry I don’t speak. I’ve been trying with you, I am trying. I’m terrified that if I don’t teach myself to talk in these moments, I’ll become silent and grow old in rooms full of the pages of my day-to-day conversations, trunks of books I’ve written over until my feelings are illegible, that we’ll have to lay in painted sheets, the words I can’t say bleached into the fabric, gnawed into the walls, sketched across your forehead and carved into your teeth. Why can I only ever write and never say? I am scared I’ll become even heavier, even stronger, that the Germans will rebuild and reinforce me, that I will solder and rust in the rain until I’m impenetrable.
Please, darling, I hope you live to see me crumble. I want to melt and smolder, I want to hear the demons scream within me, their black eyes burst, I want to stand with you and watch them incinerate. I am so scared that if I don’t start to speak you won’t want to adapt anymore to my silence, that all of the pages will be too much for you handle. What if my voice is the reason you love me? I am scared that the silence will literally be deafening and you will hate me when you lose your hearing from never using your ears. After all, isn’t that why bats are blind?
Oh, love, I’m so sorry. I wish I had found the match before I met you. I wish it all could have escaped me. I am a splintering rope and your hands are too soft to risk the blisters, your mind too nimble, too young to be slowed by the debilitating climb. Oh, don’t you dare slice up those pretty fingers. I’m sorry, I am working on falling. I have tried bulldozers and dynamite. But I am plexi-glass, I am bullet-proof vests.
Darling, I have so much to say to you, but it comes out in whispers and hums. I want to say that if I had the choice I would stay laying next to you until I had no option but to move, that I wouldn’t mind melting into you, that the other side of me never begs me to turn over, and that if it did I would stay in that position until the other side of blistered and scarred, that it wouldn’t matter because no one would ever need to see that half of me, that I could learn to walk with our legs molded together, that I wouldn’t mind the stares.
Let me under the blanket, darling, I want to feel the weight of you, I want to sweat against you, and the cotton, the polyester, the woven fibers of your security. I will soak in it. I will spend days listening to your past. I can sit cross-legged listening until my legs became numb, and when you need me gone I can camouflage myself into the grass and the lampshades, squeeze myself beneath the tiles and between the blinds, I can slow my breathing, I can hold my heart.
I am sorry, I should have told you, I should have tried. I don’t want you to hurt your hands breaking me. In time, the crowds will chip away at me. But don’t spend your life waiting, darling, you’re too graceful, you’re too kind.
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