Lost Words

I sit at my computer, staring over it, at the expanse of sky and the distant spires of San Francisco, beyond the alabaster tower of the new Bay Bridge, as if the sky will tell me the word I’m searching for. Why can’t I think of that word? I tap my friend, Thesaurus, who gives me many choices, all nouns I reject. “Use more interesting verbs,” my writing professor suggests, but I can only think in “See Dick run” verbs, not the complicated ones she would like me to use. Was my vocabulary better when I was younger? Am I getting Alzheimer’s, like my mother? My neuropsychological tests indicate “no,” but I know that I have lost many words, and Thesaurus cannot find them for me. “It’s normal aging,” says the neurologist. How can I write the ideas in my mind without words? How can I think without words? Agatha Christie, they say, used far fewer words in her last novels than in her earlier ones. “It’s normal aging,” even for Dame Agatha. What happens to the words we older people lose? Where do they go? Where were they to begin with? “Information input overload,” a phrase I learned at 24, is more relevant now, fifty years later, than ever. For every article on Facebook I read, I pay with a word. For every news feed I read, a verb slips away. For each book I read, there goes another noun. I watch as my words abandon me, filing away like silent refugees, looking for roomier minds than the shriveling brain that is mine.