Words

I knew for a long time that words had to be the most powerful medium. The right word could spring love and the wrong one had the power to decimate even the most intricate pattern of friendship. I knew that some words were hard to pronounce but could I have known that some words were nigh on impossible to say?

I met someone. A man. He was amazing. My brain never tasked itself with the pointless work of figuring out what it was exactly about him that I liked. Was it his smile or the deep impression of dimples that I only saw when he shaved the bushy beard he was so fond of? For someone who scarcely combed his hair, he was alluring in ways that I now struggle to separate in substance: was it my hormones or were these actual facts about him? He was a gorgeous man. His eyes were kind and his lips turned up into an easy smile that said more than his eyes and lips combined would ever dare to share.

There was no telling what he saw in me. We appeared as different as the night is from the day until we had conversations that took the day right into the night. I thought I was smart until I realised he knew things that bounced off hollow spaces in my own head. We crash landed into love. There were several moments of simply lying there and enjoying the dust and debris; inhaling with deep pleasure the smoke of everything we were burning to be together. Euphoria wasn’t the actual word for it. This was untainted ecstasy. It was a drug and a thrill powering an adventure premised on nothing stronger than discovery.

Many words passed between us and their tone kept changing. There were the beautiful ones and then there came the cheeky ones. Before we knew it the offensive ones jumped in through a gaping hole left by one careless word. Then there were no words to be said. Nothing. But silence has a tendency of growing too loud when your ear is waiting to transmit a word to your heart. So the silence was broken and some scars were pried open if only to let love penetrate them again like a healing salve. It worked for a while and there were words again. Cautious ones at first, and then cosy ones. They raced all the way back up into optimistic ones and before we knew it there were solid words like ‘the future’ taking up space in conversations.

See, those words took little notice of the entire universe around which they were built. They chose to exist on their own, each side safeguarded by some painful memory of the past but yet oblivious of everything except the emotion on which they were built. So imagine the shock of the universe squatting and taking its biggest shit for generations on us. We were flung apart and the tensions caused by silence and separate planning annihilated both civility and understanding in one fell swoop. The words came back but this time they were loud and fierce and each one burrowed into a separate part of our hearts. My body still tingles with the rage I felt in much the same way I am sure his does with what he called my reticence. Fury came armed with just the words to destroy what had been carefully built. There was no time to think. No time given for reconsideration. Indeed there may have been no capacity to foster kinder words over cooler emotions. We were not made like that. We were hot-headed in the same way and our words had learnt how to dance in perfect response to each other; if his created a spark then my rejoinder created a flame. We were literally the same person with the same temperament and identical ways of adopting and nurturing offence. But for our words we were the perfect match.

Still, we lost each other because in the end, sorry really was the hardest word.