The Sound of Love

The sound of love trickles down the side of my face, skirting the front edge of my ear, tickling me. It drips down from my jaw line to my blouse, behind my collar, meandering in its course so that it is headed for the dip in my back between my shoulder blades. I resist the urge to scratch and instead delight in the contact with this foreign source. Its caress is a chance encounter, not engineered by the flick of an umbrella from a passing stranger or by standing under an overflowing awning in the High Street but by pure luck; of being in the right place at the right time in the rain. I wonder if I could have dodged the teardrops, crossed from one side of the road to the other without getting wet but then I would have missed the experience.

The sound of love fills the void left by the summer. The long dusty days in the city, the grit of commuting in my eyes and sticking in my ears making me deaf to everything except the smell of buses. The odd people on the train eating their burgers and plastic sandwiches, too busy to eat at home, too busy to notice what they’re eating at sixty miles an hour, gazing out through windows too opaque to focus clearly on the passing gardens.

In Springtime, we sat on that train together, shared the newspaper, brushed knuckles covertly beneath the seats when shuffling our briefcases and exchanged conspiratorial glances when weirdos boarded our carriage.

You didn’t even tell me you were going. It was three weeks before I admitted that you’d moved on, that you weren’t just on holiday. Just as you’d never said ‘Hello’, you never said ‘Goodbye’ either. How could you treat me like this?