Stasis
from Heart-Shaped Hands.
How many days did we walk behind each other and pretend not to hear the other’s footsteps?
How many hours did we stand silently in the same spot, three feet apart?
How many reasons did we have to repel ourselves out of each other’s lives for the sake of socially hierarchies?
I don’t know.
I only started counting the moment all those things got lost in the trees past our houses.
I counted the mornings I waited at my kitchen window until I saw you leave your driveway
so we might chat those few hundred steps.
I counted the minutes until the bus inevitably cut our interactions short.
I forgot all the reasons we were not supposed to be friends because it felt so natural once we were.
You can find more memoir/prose by Slaidey Valheim here on the Bits & Bones publication.
Everything under the tag “Heart-Shaped Hands” are excepts from the same titled e-book, available on Amazon.
If you’d like to support the writer and get your hands on all these pieces (and a few more) you can purchase it here!
Thank you for reading!
