Deeply rooted in history, my history, is a quiet. Few can tell it exists when I’m eating sausage or watching a tennis match or swimming until my chest peels off with no sunscreen, but it’s there. I don’t know the color of it, or its truthful size or even how to measure it. I only know how the quiet tastes. And when I wake up, before my coffee, and that quiet stares me in the face, I just sit still with my shoes untied, staring back with my mouth agape, unsure.
Alongside the sun, my quiet history continues to rise and fall. Even with the inevitable conceit of what that all means, my articulation, it’s not nearly enough to place this credence over the sight of a woman’s breasts or the way ribs and beer taste cold. It can’t touch the endless sound of birds over a lesser fog, or hold the mute of the first summer morning – the steps over shadows and trees.