Why, hello there, you strappingly handsome young buck of a reader! I am back with another knee-deep description of my existence—so, please, suspend your boredom for a while, sit back and surrender your soul to my resounding resolutions for the remainder of this reading period.
I’d like to have a short word with you about words. At those words alone your mind might set off a chain reaction of inquisitions protruding like post-microwave popcorn out of the Pandora’s Box of possibilities. What words, you ponder as you return from the kitchen to continue reading this entry (because, you see, my mention of “popcorn” in the previous sentence awakened a sudden longing for the sensation of warm and salty buttered goodness on your tongue)—what words could she mean? Witty words—duck, spatula, tuberculosis? Words of wisdom—plethora, apocryphal, laconic? Slang words—word up? Scientific words—hyposmocoma molluscivora, dinitrophenylhydrazine? Or could she—no, she wouldn’t dare—could she be talking about…your words?
Yes, my dear friend, I would indeed be referring to the latter.
Let this be my plea for silence—no, no, I love you, please don’t shut up! All I’m saying is that words should not be piled on in the same way the lovely young ladies at the Korean deli by my house slather mayonnaise onto measly slices of sourdough. In a custom-made conversation, you’d create the perfect mix of direct objects and coordinating conjunctions for me, all with a dallop of adjectives–light on the modifiers and prepositions, avoiding the proper nouns, possessive adjectives, subordinating clauses altogether—all neatly laid out on a toasted slice of present tense. Because you see, a word may be right there waiting, at the tip-of-the-tip-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue, and before you know it you’ve tripped over it, it has skipped on down the scattered building blocks of your breath, escaping so effortlessly and with such gently sonorous ingenuity that I don’t even notice how foreign it is until my ear picks up its homeless melody. That’s when your word melts in my mind like a faultless snowflake on a child’s tongue—so cold and tasteless, yet so uniquely beautiful that I savor each one for its form, its purpose, the brief lifetime it spent lingering in listless longing to relay a pearl of information from you to me, finally forming a Tiffany’s bracelet of related ideas. Such is the beauty of communication.
But unfortunately, it’s not all as simple as that. Imagine, for a second, that every single one of your words is a passenger waiting at the terminal to board a Boeing jet. Your words have passed the security checkpoint, you have scrutinized their belongings, run them through the explosives detector, screened out the expletives and paid extra for their coffee cakes. You hold your happy words at hand for one last time before they part from your lips and present their solitary boarding passes. But, now, do you know where they will land, as you watch them reassert their independence? Do you know if they will crash, or how hard the impact will be on those below? There is no place in my city for words like yours, unless you mean them. In my harbor, there is no room on the runways for word games, no playgrounds for foolish interpretations, no time to turn your pretty terms sunny-side-up. I need to know what you mean; I need to know what flights to book next fall, and whether it is safe to let my thoughts wade in those words you left behind for me—those lovely words that ever so lyrically delight me with the dangers of their ambiguities.
So, did you get my message, love?
I wanna reconnect with you.
