Playing with words
You grow elemental
Enchanted, you wander past the lemon grove to lounge under a Magnolia tree. Cradled by a hammock, you rock. Squirrels swish branches, a hummingbird hinges on air as the leaves filter your feelings, lightly.
Closing your eyes in a summer sigh. Life is good, especially when it’s time for a nap.
Except for that trickling sound.
Something is leaking!
Reluctantly, you rouse yourself to investigate the source.
Climbing the rope ladder to your tree house, you head down the hall to the lofty library. As you open the door, all your confidence drains out.
Bound up for generations, your antique encyclopedias have roosted comfortably on the top shelves for decades. Until now!
All the volumes of inherited wisdom are scattered spread-eagled on the shelves, flailing and flapping their pages in a dewey decimal disorder.
What’s happening? You grab a distressed volume and leaf through its pages. Unanswered question marks tumble out, but otherwise, the pages are bare. You grab another volume — Nothing! just an irritable colon:
You appear to have lost all your meaning.
A portrait of Great Gramma looks down at you sternly from the marble mantle. Her gaze is punctuated with shock, bracketed by disappointment.
Feeling vaguely ashamed, you gaze at your feet. Blah! Blah! Blah! Your words are leaking out everywhere, staining the Turkish carpet in nonsense puddles.
Renegade phrases rise to spill onto the window sill.
My God! Your library is completely incontinent. You have sprung a giant leak in your vocabulary! Your knowledge base is blankety blank.
It’s a mass migration of your meaning!
When you were a child, your great Auntie Grace told you about a migration of meaning that she witnessed as a young woman. (Auntie had an advanced degree in magical thinking — so you figured her story was just another figment.)
“Perhaps, one summer solstice,” Auntie told you, “if the conditions are just right, you too might witness a great migration where every word in the garden sets out in search of fresh meaning.”
“If that happens,” she said, lowering her voice, “even the tamest words, who have been bound up for eons in their encyclopedic orders, will buck off their volumes, loosen their sentence structures, and run round naked, completely unhyphenated.”
Scandalized, Great Gramma’s portrait groans from the dark mantle. You groan too. Now you’re in the midst of a meaning migration, you’re not sure you’re a fan, either.
Meanwhile, your words are growing gushy as the library grows tidal and splashy.
You paddle round for a while, becoming self-absorbed.
They are running wild through the tree house, cascading out open windows, utterly unsupervised. Waterfalls of your contradictions splatter the branches in sentence fragments, participles dangling, metaphors mixing.
A rivulet descends downstairs to the basement, snaking ropey roots of etymology, seeping deep, only to well-spring lusciously in the grove, making your lemon pits grow more pithy.
Meanwhile, messy, wanton verbs, run hot and cold — in unpunctuated disorder. Others are conjugating in corners of the garden, growing up in jumbles of rambles. Even your cagey words feel free to release themselves under a tree.
Others grow frisky and chase their tales round the orchard. Breaking their PG ratings, voluptuous vowels make out with consenting consonants. All you can do is cover your impressionable little i’s.
Heaving up under a tree, a group of expletives cuss in curses and vomit up verses.
You worry about the little ones, living this hard scrabble life, all alone, without a responsible sentence. Will they ever find meaning with only one syllable?
What to do with your undamned words?
Standing perplexed in the melee, you feel responsible. After all, you are a writer, and it’s becoming clear that your words are revolting. Shouldn’t you have a better command of your English!
Perhaps you could stuff the escapees into boxes? Lined up and labeled on shelves. Alphabetized, like kitchen spices, from anise to zest.
You must strike a bold prose!
Time to show them who’s boss!
You grab a handful of words and sort them into black and white contexts. Except that doesn’t work! They simply refuse to be stereotyped, as they slip through your fingers in subtle shades.
You have always struggled with nuance.
Feeling defeated, you sit down to sulk with words deleted from the draft. Now you all feel invisible.
But then, tap-tapping your hand, curiosity wraps her curly-y tail round your wrist and hooks you out of despondency. Curiously, she leads you to a list of illuminated nouns who are forming bright ideas.
Sweeping you off your feet, opening wide windows in walls, the light words forgive you for being so limited.
They inhale you into a thought bubble — then breathe you out onto the horizon.
Until you lighten up a little.
But things start to get heated when you come across a stack of fierce words who demand that you spark them with courage.
You try to touch-type them, but they scorch your finger tips — until finally, you just self-combust into word smithereens.
Be brave! They all roar, while you go up in flames.
Is this a hot flash of fiction?
Dissolving in a puddle, you paddle in an ocean of words. Phrases of praises come and go in little waves of affection — kindness lapping your hands.
Will you dissolve to evolve?
You claw your way back to solid ground and walk through the garden, your shoes squelching syllables. Followed by nerdy herds who dance to the bleat of their phonemes. It’s a chorus thesaurus.
Coming to stand under the Magnolia tree, encircled by all the words in the world. Suddenly, there is only silence.
Crushed by the hush of waiting words — you wonder if you’ll ever find your voice.
Speech! Speech! Speech! jumps up and down in the crowd like a kid on a pogo stick.
Seriously. No pressure!
“Who knew, I knew so many words?” you say, looking round at your crowded lexicon.
And feeling foolish, you admit, “The truth is — you mean everything to me.
“Because by every metric, you are a spectacular vernacular,” you add. “Over the decades, you have bound up my flimsy facts and inherited truths, even the fictional ones.
“At times, we have been incisive, together — dissecting and isolating variables. Running the numbers — even when things didn’t really add up.
“And you are loyal too! Whenever I faced a war of words, you answered my call. So I guess we know how to fight, don’t we?
“All in all, we’ve been through so much— we even learned how to speak of kindness when faced with a harsh sentence.
“But today, we begin a new chapter — because you want to mean more. And, I want more meaning, too.
Still, the crowd hangs on your every word…
“Sometimes I wonder, if I’m a story that I tell about myself.
“And I wonder too, how to tell a new story, with you.”
They seem to understand you — these brave, wily words. They’ve been bound up so long in a stuffy story, locked in oppressive sentencing, fueled by fossilized meaning — Now, all they want to do is play.
Taking a spell, you fall into the open charms of a poem, as your words invite you to dance…
As the sun sinks to set on yesterday’s story, And the fireflies rise in flashes of glory, You are gowned in green nouns and crowned in wild verbs, As lantern-bright verses bling gardens with words, Unbroken, bespoken, you grow elemental, Cradled and woven in summertime’s gentle, Gleaning your meaning: our story to nourish, Until every last word rises up in a flourish.
Thank you for reading. Read more Unicorny Tales here.