The Memory of Silence

   ‘Are you sure you won’t drink again, without speaking to somebody?...’ 

    I didn’t think Annie really understood, but neither did I mind. It doesn’t matter what you tell someone, they will make up their own mind anyway - even your own sister.

    Of course I did tell her about finding the body in the kitchen when I worked as an ambulance driver, and how some years after that I’d met the man’s son without letting on what I'd seen. Even now I think of him, and wonder how that young man’s life has been. When people say it’s better to talk about having a problem, like drinking, sometimes it’s not. Just try going off in some new direction, and pray that it never comes back to haunt you. It might not.

    Annie sent a photograph of the English seaside while out walking. Annie used to run, only now she walked as she said her hips hurt too much. There was mostly flat grey sand beneath a thin strip of land. In the distance two people walked a dog. Annie said it was nice to get out. I said it was good, too, only the place looked dreary and sterile, and the only thing you could imagine moving were the clouds.

   Annie said if she didn’t go running - or walking, she would go crazy. A friend also told her why didn’t she have an affair if she wasn’t happy. ‘Maybe he really loves me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you never know if someone does... Perhaps it’s easier to think they do.’ I was quite sure that he did. ‘In his way,’ as Annie once said.

     She was still enjoying the writing course in the Black Forest, but wasn’t going as often as she liked. She was also planning on going back to the islands, at Christmas, to stay at a friend's farm. ‘I really feel at peace,’ she said. Annie was always in love with a dream, my father once told her, which of course she never forgot.

                

“They all looked like families coming back from Church, wearing their Sunday best. In reality, they were refugees who had no idea how drastically their lives were about to change. It hurts to always feel like a foreigner, with your roots exposed, with this feeling that everything is temporary, that life is back there in a future that never seems to get here. What has happened to us is very hard, but there are so many who have it so much worse.”

       Uva de Aragon, The Memory of Silence