Whispers...

I work two days a week as a site agent for a home builder in a quiet neighborhood that gets no traffic. To go several days without speaking to anyone other than my dogs is not unusual. Carla's often away on assignment working at Shands Hospital in Gainesville on five to eight day shifts. The only words I spoke today were “20028”. That's my member number at the gym. Since that 6AM dissertation it's all been soliloquy. This afternoon I thought I heard someone sing several notes, barely perceptible above the low hiss of the forced air murmuring down from the overhead ducts. Again! I heard the lilting tease... notes so weak they must be cried by a sickly child sulking in an upstairs closet, face down on a pile of dirty bedclothes. Maybe someone is hugging the outside wall behind me, lost in hushed love songs to the brown stucco... maybe it's just a dog walker more than a block away, a sing song humming fragile on the wind. But the truth holds no part of such fanciful speculation. The whispers are of my own making, in my own head, and would go unheard if others were near. The ghost songs are the unhealthy fruit of the solitude itself, fertilized and encouraged to grow by its own consumption.