THINKING

 

“What are you thinking?” she would ask, in those quiet moments of the day when they were together, moments of such nearly complete happiness that she needed only the last tiny reassurance against her last tiny uncertainty.

​ Sometimes, he would reply gently, “I`m thinking of you –nothing else – just you,” and when he said it, she felt silly for having asked, though she was filled, too, with the desired richness of knowing that his love was as strong today as it was yesterday, as it would be tomorrow.

 And if she asked tomorrow, and if he smiled indulgently and said how silly she was, she did not mind. She understood.

 His mind was a mystic cavern which contained the secrets and mysteries of the universe, like the sky at night, with as many stars as there were grains of sand. Which was why she loved him. And so it was silly, as she knew, to pick this moment, or that moment, to ask him what he was thinking. Though because her own thoughts were so simple, so very simple that she was almost ashamed of them, she had to have one moment in the day, even if it was just one small moment when she was sure that his thoughts connected with hers.

 Sometimes, he would appear restless and would sigh with covert weariness, as if her question touched some fine nerve of irritation, and then, though she would feel momentarily cast out into the chaos of exile, she would understand, as soon afterwards, that he was tired after work, or that he was feeling low, that he needed some time to himself, and that she had just made the mistake of picking the wrong moment.

 But it was when he turned away quietly, seeming to be busy with something else, and when he said, casually, “Oh, nothing,” that she understood, as if an arrow had been shot through her heart, that he had immediate thoughts so private that he would not reveal them to her, and then, in her own privacy, she writhed with jealousy.

Though it did not last long, and in time she found other ways of being sure of what she wanted to be sure of.

 And she began to understand, as she realised how infinitely complex the workings of the mind are, like a perplexity of atoms rushing in their own micro-patterns through the invisibility of space, how truly silly the question was, so that gradually, as if releasing herself from an addiction, she stopped asking it.

Sometime later, quite accidentally, she met someone who jolted her mind suddenly towards a quarter of the universe whose existence she had never previously suspected.

 “What are you thinking?” he asked, one evening, a short time afterwards.

 The question took her by surprise.

 “Oh, nothing,” she replied casually, turning away and seeming to be busy with something else.

 John Wheatley

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Published in FLASH FICTION NORTH July 2020