When Cicadas Start to Sing

The night it all began, it was midsummer and the cicadas were buzzing in the deep, twisty boughs of an old banyan tree. We were talking about something completely unrelated and somehow your hand suddenly found mine, enfolded it briefly at times, and kept turning it over and over in yours. I remember holding myself stock still, all the while my mouth was keeping up the talk about that unrelated thing. I allowed a part of me to be part of you in the motion of our hands, watching every move from a sort of out-of-body distance and wondering how they seemed to have acquired a life of their own. My emotions hadn’t quite caught up to the reality of a new found intimacy.

In those moments it was as though our hands were like the cicadas in the trees, feather- like caresses making a merry conversation in a language all our own. This was to become so much a signature thing between us: the continuous digit finding resonance against digit, each finger mapping its way home in the press against its soulmate, until eventually whole palms were met and nestled into the other’s embrace. But then restlessness would set in only moments later – and the whole routine would start up again, one digit climbing over another, searching for a resting place. It’s strangely what I liked the most about us.

We never spoke as much to each other again as through our hands that night. Not in all the subsequent conversations shared even about things that really mattered. In fact the more words became the conduit of thought and hearts’ desires, we grew further apart. Words. It’s been said that they could be a double edged sword. And sure enough, my poetry and passion would one day become only putrefaction and poison to you, so the more I said the more things got shut down, till our whole world ground to a crashing halt. My words buried us.

Looking back, our milestone moments were always when nothing at all was said. In the quiet upward gazing and wonder of love, heartbeats suspended, lips held but a whisper apart. We used to dwell there for an eternity, as though daring the other to break that sweet spell of silence. Or it was in those split-second knowing looks when each had captured the other’s thought, as though a ball was tossed at pace and well caught between soft hands. We would pause fleetingly, smile, and simply carry on with whatever we were doing at that time. I always loved best your hand resting on the small of my back; it was in that quiet, firm press that I knew absolute adoration and security. Or when your curious fingers stole their way up to the nape of my neck, begin to twirl and ponder the locks of my hair that I had tucked into a pony tail. I never felt so cherished. You especially liked to trace the ridges of my bones, drawing soft, invisible lines across me with your fingers from shoulder tip to shoulder tip. I knew you felt the same joy in a tiny kiss planted on your ring finger, then long devoid of its circlet of broken promises. In the merest brush of my mouth you knew compensation, completeness, and renewed hope. Your brimming eyes told me so. No, it was never in our words that we found meaning or connection.

Then I opened my mouth and the words tumbled out, and we tumbled downhill after them, like Jack and Jill. The more I said, the less you responded with, so the louder I said them. Until the house was nothing but my bleating. Your silence bounced off the walls. outside the banyan trees in the street had no leaves that summer, because a frost had come the spring before and killed them off. I remembered how that August was the quietest I’d ever known it to be. I never knew realised why.

Then autumn swept in and you left me, abruptly. On some vague, unsatisfactory pretext. We never said goodbye. Or forgive. Or sorry. Never even had the dignity of a decent fight, an out and out row so I could smash some plates or throw you one of my best punches. Or my best line, to deeply wound and maim. You simply went. All I had left was a mouthful of unspoken words that I had to swallow sideways down my throat, like so many razor blades, so I would choke and bleed on the inside.

I was walking down the street tonight where the old banyan trees grew, counting my steps, as I always did these days. I hadn’t even noticed that it was summer again. The air was sticky and heavy, with the threat of a thunderstorm. I could smell the almost sickening sweetness of frangipani growing in someone’s back garden. Something broke into my thoughts and I came to a standstill. I then realised what had interrupted me. The cicadas were singing, no, practically screaming, from deep within the darkness of the trees. Little feathery hands were rubbing, twisting and wringing against each other, screeching their songs of insect anguish and insect lament. I held up my own empty palms, like ghosts under the pale August moonlight, and thought that they looked lost and lonely somehow.

I miss the dance of our hands.