Atomic Words
Dear Diary,
Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, I had nothing original to say.
I pulled down the creaky, creepy set of stairs, where the spiders and dust and bits of fiberglass insulation lived. I crawled into the attic and found hundreds of thousands of words in an old trunk.
I pulled them out by thick handfuls. They felt vaguely familiar, a deja vu from a lost dream.
Underneath a layer of adverbs, I saw a glow. Words grouped together forming something greater than themselves, molecules of thoughts and sentences.
The light from the atomic words grew stronger, cursed treasure buried away long ago and forgotten.
I must have read at least a million words in my lifetime; The souls of tortured scribes and heartbroken poets laid bare. The words shared their feelings with mine like covalent bonds. Each word that resonated pushed me one step further from my typewriter.
For each word I read, I thought, there was one less for me to write. Still I consumed them, until all of my atomic words were packed into this old, neglected trunk.
I looked down at the glowing trunk and repacked the handfuls of nouns and adjectives and verbs back inside.
Later, on a glassy ocean, I overturned the trunk, sending the words adrift at sea. The words still glowed, like jellyfish rising and falling with the gentle current. By morning, red skies would bring rough seas.
Eventually the words would find their way into a glass bottle washed up on a sandy shore.
I read hundreds of thousands of more words. Then one day, I discovered the trunk in the attic was once again full.
For every word I read, the trunk became one word heavier.
I walked along the edge of the sand close to dusk. A small wave receded back into its tide, revealing a small bottle. I picked up the glass, and emptied the words into my hand. Of all the words floating through all of the ocean, there were only five in this message.
these
are
all
of
ours
I went home, pulled down the stairs to my attic, and carefully carried a full trunk down into my study. When I unlatched its brass hook, the top opened on its own and the atomic words shined brighter than the candle lighting my typewriter. I slid a fresh sheet into my machine, and handful by handful, letter by letter, I typed — the words clicking loudly onto the paper.
As the trunk emptied and the stack of sheets grew on my desk, I had a premonition: the atomic words poured out into the ethereal realm, into a queue. Like my feelings, the covalently bonded words “unique” and “alone” shared the proverbial electrons “You are not”. “Everything” and “nothing” were joined together by “matters”. There were countless examples of these ironies.
By the end of an unknown number of evenings and candles and pages later, only two atomic words remained in the trunk. I had come so far, but could feel myself reaching the bottom of the large pile of words I’d collected. There were only two left. I lowered the candle flame carefully into the trunk.
keep
going
