I wish I knew why I always go back to dark and gray moments, when the silence was loud, and the words were left unsaid, and glances were shared or avoided, and the pregnant awkwardness was packageable, palpable, electrical. Those are the images that ended up written into the hallowed chambers of my heart, those unanswerable, confusing, perplexing moments, when a look could have been a question or a judgment, when the emotion was either sadness or fear, the expression wanting to fall one way or the other, but caught in potential, unresolved, the delicate balance, uncommitted to north or south or west or east. Those moments left me anxious and awkward. Unsure. And it’s the unsureness that was the stenographer, carefully recording the date and the time and the place and the composition of the look or the word or the gesture that put me in that place, where everything was suddenly fragile, and every eye might close about me, backs turning to leave me unseen, the permanent twilight shrouded in stormy clouds that cannot seem to convulse and burst.

The silent gray moments are the loudest, leaving me scrambling for color and heat and music.