Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Word

I love words. I love the way they move, seamlessly streaming together, tying tributaries to rivers to oceans of immaculate sound, like a drumbeat in my head echoing the beat of a heart much bigger than my own.


Words sound so different in the real world than they do in my mind. I can sew them up as tightly as I like, bind them into shapes and hang them to dry in the noonday sun, yet still I return to find them bursting at their seams, shifting and churning and reaching their broad leaves to some new and unintended literary sun.


Words dance in my mind, constantly, like tireless nymphs in some forgotten garden. I wake to streaming words like puppets strings, and I am a marionette twisting to their designs. It may be that I create the words, but often it feels as if the words create me. They shout at me and whisper softly in my ears. They tell me that they love me and they laugh at my pain.


Am I too a word, spoken long ago, playing out my definition endlessly upon some earthly page? And where am I placed; in what sentence and paragraph do I make my home? Perhaps I am an exclamation, or a sigh. Perhaps I am the opening of a monologue.

But I do not know the speaker.


I look back at these words even as I type them, and at the shape they take: they are a sideways city, a mountainscape; they are a line-graph chart, an unorganized bookshelf, a forest, a rising challenge, and the notes in a song. Above all of these things, they seem to be a code. A code that if I only look at them long enough, if only I continue to watch the words in their endless ebb and flow, perhaps I could decipher.


If I keep writing, perhaps I’ll see the picture, the mural that these words create. Or perhaps not.


Maybe I am just a word, no sooner spoken than forgotten. And my words, likewise, the thoughts of a momentary thought, will be forgotten.


But for now, I am vibrant, alive, full of hidden meaning and intrigue.


And I will lay my thread in the tapestry.


And I will keep my secrets.