CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Words
I wish I had them
I would love to write. I would love to use my physical hands and grab the ethereal thoughts that float on the seemingly endless seas of emotions that make up what is me, and shape them into pristine words. I wish to write down through the arbitrary symbols we chose to represent them, and show you. I wish I could share my thoughts with you, through words. I wish I knew what I wanted to say, to begin with. I wish I could strangle that shapelessness into a physical thing. I would hold it in the palm of my sweaty hands, point at it, and say, “See?”
I wish I had words. Better yet, I wish I didn’t need them, with all their side effects and unintentional meanings. Darkness is bad and light is good, but are they, really? Isn’t one merely the absence of the other, and thus both one and the same? And so how can I communicate anything at all when the only tool I have to do it is so surreptitiously addicted to trickery?
We use them daily, words. Daily. We call the span of time our planet takes to pirouette around the semi-perpetual explosion we call the Sun a day,”and so daily I wish words could help me connect to my fellow humans. I wish I could use them to describe, even to myself, the fathomless oceans of shapeless thoughts that inhabit my mind. My mind.
Me.
Who am I, really? A collection of experiences produced by the physical limitation that states two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and so I see a world only I can, because no one in the history of the universe will be able to sit here and reflect on all my past experiences while staring semi-drunk at this screen.
God bless the screen and the keys I’m pressing for they are all I have. Still I wish I had words, better words, more words. I wish again I didn’t need them, but alas boxes we need, and so we neatly place everything we perceive into a box, where it fits perfectly — never mind the things that don’t fit the boxes; never mind the abstractiveness and uniqueness of human perception. If I love and so do you, we must feel the same exact emotion. Love must be the same for both of us because the book where we list words — where we use words to describe themselves — says so. A dictionary, we call that book. And under the entry for love there’s a description, and so every human being who has ever used that word to describe their feelings must feel the exact same emotion. There is only one word to describe both your love and mine, and thus, if the word is the same, the feeling must also be. Never mind the uniqueness of our experiences and the futility of describing them through words.
I love you. That much you understand.
You know I: that’s who’s writing. And you know you: that’s who’s reading. And you know love. You know your love and you call it love, so you must, therefore, also know my love, for I also call it love. If the word is the same, once more, the feeling must also be. Never mind that when we say “I love” and “you love,” we have different words for you and I. Our love is the same.
Never mind words — especially mine. Never mind what I have to say. I don’t even know what that is. All I know is it wants to come out — to burst out, painfully — and in the lack of proper means to describe it, I find myself perpetually accompanied by a feeling familiar to me — a good friend — one I might try and describe with the word loneliness.
Good old words. One must love them.
Thank you, words, for allowing me to tell the human being reading you — another consciousness perceiving the world from a different point in space from which I do; one I could never inhabit — that I love them.
Them. He, she. Who cares? These are just words and not the thing I love. I love the person they represent. I love you, reader. I love that you perceive the universe from a different point in space — and time. I love your uniqueness. If I didn’t, how could I love mine? I wouldn’t go as far as to say I love myself — I sometimes catch myself feeling that one ugly emotion we describe with a word opposite to love, although I’ve been getting better at preventing myself from bathing in self-hatred — but I have to admit that every second I decide to stay alive and experience this universe — experience you experiencing this universe — I must love myself; or at least my perception of existence.
I am, clearly, just rambling, which is another word familiar to me: rambling. I have to use it every time I indulge in listening to my thoughts and trying to use the flawed gift of words to describe them, so that I acknowledge that perceiving my thoughts from the outside — reading them just now — must be overwhelming and confusing.
Forgive me. I’m rambling. I do it a lot. I ramble.
So you see how that word has a negative connotation? Can you see the side effects trickling through the letters? I taste their bitterness daily. That is, every time the sun is in the sky and then it’s not. And then it’s there again, and I’m still rambling and tasting the putrid flavor of self-judgment.
A social being is what I am, hardwired to belong. So what do you do when you don’t? What do you feel?
What I feel is the need to explain myself; explain my own perception. And so, back I go to my chest of words, and I take a long look at them. They seem insufficient, but they’re all I have.
Please, oh god Chaos — random statistical chance; the one force who can choose what exists and what doesn’t — don’t leave me without words, for I hate them, and without them, I’d have nothing to hate, and I’d have nothing to feel. Nothing but the love for perceiving my world and perceiving others perceiving their world and perceiving me perceiving them. That’s all there is, in the end: perception.
There is no I; there is no you. There’s just perception. And yet here I am, nonexistent. And there you are, joining me in clutching to words and hoping we can use the same ones to internalize we are all the same. After all, we use the same words, so we must have the same exact experience of being what we decided to call a human.
Thank you for words, oh lord Chaos. Thank you for allowing me to exist and not fit in. Thank you for loneliness. Thank you for hate. Thank you for existence and perception and consciousness. But most of all, thank you for words. I hate them, and they hate me back. But without them, I’m alone.
