Janus

DENIAL 

It was her first dress. 

The first and only one she'd tried on since coming into the tailor shop. It was midnight blue and silver at the hems, decorated by intricate curls. 

But as he continued to stare, they seemed to gather together in a quiet calligraphy, gently swirling and never content to sit still in one place. But they were most definitely letters. 

He could make out the beginnings of a word—a capitalization, really. It pressed out against the layers of blue draped over her shoulder like an outstretched finger, familiar and beckoning. 

And as he slowly pressed back, a memory stirred, old and new. 

"This one will do." She spoke softly and in concession. 

She shied away from his touch, averting her gaze downward as she did so. 

Something about her expression locked up any apology he could sputter out, but he could not exactly tell why: whether it was because of the tremor on her bottom lip, barely perceptible; the strange quaver of a smile that disappeared as quickly as it came; or the glassy eyes that gleamed with something like washed-out pewter. 

His own eyes flickered back to the dress. 

The lights of the tailor shop seemed to coalesce against the fabric. Lines upon lines of familiar words whispered to him from an inverted chiaroscuro of color and contour. 

They begged him to say something. 

Anything. 

"What is it?" Her question lashed like thunder. 

He jolted as a shadow of silence suddenly overwrote everything and he could barely discern the question. 

She waited for an answer, nonetheless. 

But "Nothing" was all that was left and nothing came out; he thought he could see her follow-up, too, scrawled out from words only he could see. 

Only nothing would come out either. 

Instead, she swept past him toward the checkout. And for just a moment, the light caught one last time onto her dress. 

For just a moment, every letter and every word aligned as they should, and he could remember where they had come from. 

ANGER 

It had been so long since he had sat down with a pen and paper; his handwriting had become nothing more than unintelligible scrawlings that hung limply against the white background. 

Nothing even close to those artful strokes which she had worn. 

Entire nights were dedicated to recreating what he had seen. Only everything down to the way he put his tone down always sounded wrong—it was like listening to an echo, never changing. 

It was why he sat alone in the unlit kitchen—trying to listen to the sound of nothing. 

But it was early into the night, and the moonlight whispered to him. It staggered in through the blinds in a mockery of incomprehensible lines. 

Every sharp corner became a thousand intertwining pen strokes that stretched across the entirety of the room; some met in frustratingly nonsensical stutters that seemed to ask him "why" and for "what" and beg him for "more." 

It spoke in a deep timbre like bells in an unending metronome that pounded within his head with each toll. 

And he could just about see the answer to each question splayed out there on the walls: 

"Nothing." 

Then he blinked, and, suddenly, it was as if the Moon herself had stepped through those blinds, with hair that gleamed like gossamer under her great eye. 

Her mouth was drawn tight into a Roman smile, and her eyes wore no glimmer of light, only rings of tiredness. She was like an old marble divinity recently rediscovered and repainted in a richly dark umber skin. 

Each and every brushstroke writhed under the scrutiny in their own language of discomfort and judgment as she began to walk toward him. 

Each step rippled throughout her manuscript. 

Every word reared to burst out. 

And everything he had to say was written in a crumpled pile of paper. 

He had to take something. 

Anything. 

Even if he did not understand. 

So, guiltily, he whispered, "I'm sorry." 

That would make her stop only a step away. 

"For what?" The question rolled off of her in something close to a shout. 

She loomed over him like a living eclipse, and every answer worth speaking was absorbed by her. 

And, of course, all that was left was: 

"Nothing." 

She tilted her head at that. "Then why say it?" 

Like before in the tailor shop, she waited. 

He wished more than anything in that moment that he had never thrown away his writings. That he had committed them to memory. That he had something beyond the mere truth of: 

"I don't know." 

But there was nothing else, and nothing came after. It would be deafeningly silent instead; the quiet breathed in and out in cloyingly considerate punctuations for what felt like an eternity before she spoke again.

"Goodnight, January," she sighed. 

He let out a small breath of relief as she stepped back. At the very least, he had an answer for this. 

"Goodnight…" he started. 

Except he only had half of the answer, and she could tell almost immediately. 

"Friends for years, and you haven't thought yet to ask me my name." Her eyes glistened slightly. 

He did not respond, desperately scouring her body for the other half of the answer. 

"Right." She slowly nodded, staring. 

Every answer writ on her skin suddenly began to disappear, then, and every wall seemed to sprawl with a thousand more indecipherable scrawlings. 

But the words looked different this time—the same. They unfurled around her in a never-ending tunnel written from a single word. 

From a single name, over and over. 

"You're…" He struggled to understand it. 

She stared at him a moment longer before opening her mouth. 

"Uranus." In a curt whisper more like a breath. 

And then she left, but her name remained. 

Everywhere. 

BARGAINING 

There was nowhere else to look. 

Nothing else to see. 

It repeated like a script over every wall; his name preceded each line of dialogue in a distorted manner, as though written in a careless hand. 

Her name, in contrast—a distant shape of blue—sharpened after each cue. It beckoned him to speak back with an increasing exasperation, even while everything else blurred. 

Everything he could have said sounded like something too late. And yet the same conversation seemed to play out every day between them in strange rehearsals of temptation in which only she spoke. 

Always using the same lull of greetings. 

Always issuing from thin lips. 

Always spoken under narrowed eyes.

It was something reassuring, to live by.

Until one day, the rehearsals stopped, and the writing on the walls disappeared; every word replaced by the sound of silence, without the barest nicety of an ellipsis. 

He was sitting alone in the kitchen when it happened, barely able to breathe; his throat burned as every unspoken word seemed to crumble into ash. 

They swept toward the kitchen entryway in mites as small as dust and into the hallway beyond. 

To where she slept. 

But there was no script to tell him what to do—whether to stand up or remain seated. So he simply continued to choke on his own silence. 

Nothing he could say would ever sound right. 

That was the truth. 

And yet something in him cut deeply at the thought of remaining silent—it tore at the seams of his very being. 

It brandished his tongue like a knife and clogged his mouth with the taste of blood as he bit down. 

It compelled him to wash it out. 

He needed to wash it out; it would choke him to death otherwise. 

If only he knew what to say. 

There was only the truth and it barely had its own manuscript—barely a word. But it was still something more than ash and blood. 

It was something he could do, to say.

Nothing else sounded right but nothing else sounded wrong either. 

He could very well remain silent. 

Perhaps he should. 

Maybe he would. 

DEPRESSION 

It would be his first time saying her name, and it would be barely a word since had last spoken—it was disappointing, pathetic. 

"Uranus." Quietly but firmly. 

It barely lit up the silence. 

"Uranus." Louder but with a shake. 

Barely a spark. 

He stared down the hall at a door that was both foreign and familiar—light seeped out in something less than a whisper. 

Anything it had to say warped behind him as he slowly walked to the door; every step was like a sigh of relief against the floorboards—and each one dug deeper into his throat, choking him. 

He was hardly certain that he had the breath to speak again but, still, he opened his mouth. "January?" From the door, in a tone of surprise. 

Suddenly, the grip on his throat did not seem so tight—maybe he could try for another word, something different maybe. 

"Yes." He stared at the ground; not a single letter lay writ in the doorlight. 

She did not respond, yet another word did not seem so unmanageable to him; the door was only a step away, after all, and it would be easy to hear him. 

"Uranus?" he repeated. 

"Just come in, January." In a more relenting tone that was not quite unkindly. 

It was more mortifying to hear the sound of his own name spoken in response. 

He nearly wished it belonged to someone else. 

It was more so gratifying to open the door and hear no response beyond the creak of old hinges. 

And to see her there, turned away. 

Adorned in a midnight-blue dress—that same dress from so many nights ago. Cast darkly in the light from where she stood, staring out the only window in the room. 

Barely a word of its gentle silver was legible. 

He enjoyed that. 

For what it was worth, the silence was reassuring after so much time spent not talking. It felt like he was truly trying. 

Trying to make up for his loss of words. 

"What did you want to say?" she asked. 

Almost instantly, his tongue seemed eager to defy the new quiet—it curled around something soft and alien. He tried to mull over, rolling it this way and that; nothing sounded right and yet… 

It all came through in a stagger. "I'm sorry that I never asked you what your name was." 

She did not respond for a moment, seemingly playing around with her own answer before she spoke again. 

"That's okay." She did not turn to look at him. 

Disappointment ran coldly down his spine. 

It all sounded so wrong. 

"I didn't mean… I never meant to push away," he said, in a near whisper. 

She merely tilted her head at that. 

"I…" He bit down on his bottom lip. 

Guesswork was all he was doing—responding to no one but himself. For every word he said, his tongue became duller, like he was still reciting things from a script written only by him. 

It was tiring trying to conjure an apology. 

So, cleanly, and clearly, he asked, "What can I do to make things right?" 

And for a moment, she did not do anything. 

Neither did he. 

He could only wait. 

Nothing else sounded right. 

ACCEPTANCE 

She began slowly and quietly but with little concession as she spoke. 

"I want you to know me truly—to say my name without any fear." 

She turned around. 

And scripts in the thousands stared back from the ruffles of her dress and every word overlapped in a riotous motley of insanity; the longer he stared, the more each word uncurled into meaningless ornamentation—the more the knot in his head unraveled itself like dark-blue linen. 

"Can you do that?" Her words gospel in comparison. 

Whatever words he thought he had seemed to change a thousand times unspoken; he savored the lack of taste as though it was milk and honey. 

And nothing sounded right. 

But still, he spoke.