Loss For Words
by Maximillian Orsini

They sat together at the caf&ecute; on the hill. Under the arching umbrella, John could feel the sun coming through like a warm shadow. He looked at his friend of nine years differently that day and noticed his eyes slightly more tired looking, more slanted, as if he were not quite awake, not quite there. John watched the foam rise from his coffee, and then, gradually as the steam fell away toward the lake, in brisk waves of time. They said nothing to each other. They spoke the mute language of defeat.

Beneath them John could hear the lake water pulling at the shore. He thought of the concrete shoreline as he often did of his past: bold, permanent, safe. "Days are like waters replacing," John thought to himself. That was his philosophy.

He looked down at the table. He had a book of Creeley poems. That was his favorite poet. He admired the obscurity, the bleakness, the invisibility of his characters as "fragments of a field." But all that was somewhat irrelevant now. He had just completed his master's thesis. He had completed his goals. His father was proud. But pride was so short-lived, John thought. How often had he been proud? Pride was like a wave that came in, rose briefly, and then dropped away from reality.

But before John became consumed, he looked at his friend, staring off into the distance. His thoughts shifted sharply like the clouds beyond. He stared at his removed friend. He thought of how that man across from him had whirled bodies out of the wreck, how he carried the dead to their graves. He watched his friend like a flame wavering in and out.

John sat quietly now. So much of the world took hold of him. For a minute, he was not himself. He was not a student, nor was he his father's son. He was a man on a hill. A man whose mouth rolled forth softly like a wave.