The Silent Exit

To part “the Russian way” means stretching nerves like strings.
Each time I ask myself what the next tomorrow brings.

So I just leave “the English way,” without a heavy scene –
A quiet exit, nothing left between.

We both pretend that I’ll be back, it’s only for a while.
With a soft goodbye and that half-melancholy smile,
I turn the key, the engine hums to life again.
Another chapter in this slow, unhurried flame.

The windshield is a screen, a movie always on –
Not the road outside that plays from dusk till dawn,
But our deferred love’s endless, fragile, tender light,
And all the days that slowly pass us by.

Kilometers ahead, a road I know by heart.
This moving solitude, this quiet world apart.
The landscape blurs into a muted, shifting hue;
The only constant is my thought of you,
Of who we are and all that we’ve been going through.

And I don’t want this film to ever find its end.
How could it end at all? Just look at how we live:
Our children play and grow – that’s what our love can give.

This “deferred love” of ours is simply love we chose to keep,
To plant in deeper time, not spend in moments cheap.

With a soft goodbye and that half-melancholy smile,
I turn the key, the engine hums to life again…
Our deferred love’s endless, fragile, tender light,
And all the days that slowly pass us by.