Trapped In Stone

"Someday when the pages of my life end, I know you will be one of its most beautiful chapters."

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There was a morbid beauty in silence where there should be noise. Whispers carried in the wind that would never reach their destination. Entire lives, tucked away in the cracks of the noise surrounding everyday life. Silence had never been a staple of their relationship. Alexander Hamilton was never quiet, constantly speaking to everyone and no one at all, murmuring ideas into the breeze around him so even if they never reached his writings the world would still harbour them. Conversely, Elizabeth Schuyler has was quiet more often than not - but she had never crossed the line into silence, presence pervaded by the clicking of heels on hard floors and the soft humming of melodies only vaguely familiar but not forgotten. Then there had been John Laurens. Loudspoken in words and even louder in his actions - and yet in the end the most silent of them all.

Letters. Letters had always been Hamilton's strong suit. His comfort, the lullabies that would sing him to sleep in the deepest hours of the darkest nights. He could decipher and rearrange any letters set in front of him - create works of art out of the vaguest ideas. Yet the words presented to him now left him dumbfounded, leaning heavily against a desk once so full of noise as he listened to the wavering and somber voice of Eliza just a few paces and a world away across the room.

"... was killed in a gunfight..."

The rest of the words faded into a faint static at the back of his mind as for once in his life he could barely comprehend the letters presented to him, and it was a long moment before he was able to look back up at Eliza, tears sparkling in her eyes and leaving salty tracks down her face. Quickly averting his eyes, Hamilton offered only a squeeze on her hand before he disappeared around the corner, a whispered phrase hanging heavy in the air behind him,

"I have so much work to do."

Legacy. What is a legacy? Hamilton had always assumed it was a story, told for generations in your awake, a modicum of immortality granted to those snatched away from the world, the beginning of a saga. Eliza had always assumed the word legacy rang heavy with the implications of the end of an era. Now, they both understood different. A legacy was much darker than the philosophers led anyone to believe. A shared definition was passed between heartbreak and sorrow. Legacy: the silence left behind in the world after a voice is silenced.

Standing as they were, a stark cloud of melancholy against the early evening light, an understand dawned on Alexander and Eliza. An understanding reached through silence and letters and stone.

The only thing anyone could ever really leave behind was memories. For weeks, walking past a certain corner of the house would summon the memory of a sunny smile and a warm laugh, of nights spent curled into the warmth of human contact, watching the fire wither to only dimly lit embers. Memories trapped in the walls of the house, in the warm wind and the chill of a night surrendered to the midnight stars, of a man now lost to the world and a love lost to a budding family.

Memories stayed trapped in stone. Letters often stood engraved in the same hard surface - surreal and yet so very struck into everyday life that they haunted waking dreams. There, in the hazy time where day melts into night and the world is encased in a gray where the horizon is blurred and uncertain, John Laurens left behind one last memory trapped in the silence of stone, Elizabeth Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton left there to bear witness, wrapped up in each other's arms and softly shaking underneath the weight of the world now just that much darker around them.

"In Loving Memory of John Laurens"

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"The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living."