That thing

They keep asking questions... blaming me for my feelings, making it my fault that I can't be involved. Why didn't you call? Why didn't you ask? Why didn't you do that thing?

Oh... that thing... why didn't you just say so... that thing that didn't work last time. I didn't do it because it didn't work. It hasn't worked all the times that we've tried it.

We believed in it to you know. It didn't last. It was philosophy and politics not policy and practice. Nothing came from it.

You got it off your chest, the baggage off your back and we picked it up and carried it home with us. We piled it up in the corner and resolved not to do it. Because we believed. We sat there and wondered about how great it would be if it worked.

And then? Then we stopped... we stopped talking about you, we stopped absently letting people feel not involved... we tried it. We watched. We watched as other people immediately went back to doing the same thing. We watched as people got left out. Not just any people...us.

We watched ourselves become the new thing to talk about, the new inconvenience. We wondered first what we'd done; then we wondered what we could do. We called and we talked, we explained, we were careful not to write things, say things, or do things and we became a part of the shadows and the silence.

No one missed us. Or if they didn't they never called, they never tried, they never explained. We were suddenly there like a coffee table and a chair, nothing needed from us, nothing expected from us, if we were gone people sat elsewere they found other places to set there things. We were just a prop...no longer part of the party but instead part of the decoration.

Parties are more people. They would think to invite us because we were more...not part... just filler for an empty room. We were a mere technicality, a statistic... no one talked to the statistic no one wondered what the technicality thought. We became someone else.

Abuse is something people notice but neglect we can look at neglect and say we never meant to cause it. We didn't know. Someone should have said something. But neglect it flies by blindly until there is nothing but a layer of dust to show that time has passed and it has been occuring all along.

Abandoned in the dust we lost our voice. We assumed that to love well would be to forgive and say nothing.

We became nothing... not sad or happy, not alive or dead we became lost...
and no one was looking to find us.