Words

Words. I live by words. I type words, speak words, write, spell, think and assemble words. I invent words and loan words to people who cannot. I typeset, compose and calligraph words. I whisper them, shout them and swallow them.

I heal with words. I fight over them, stack them up in unintelligible phrases in documents and proposals of all kinds and make considerable money doing it. I write words on the back of my hand, though my mother forbade it.

I long to hear certain words. I even weep for not hearing them, all the while knowing that they have no meaning at all. I duck words. I wake up in the middle of the night trying to remember them.

I underline words, highlight words, and sculpt them into bad poetry. I eat words, on occasion, though not nearly as often as I ought to. I erase words, retract words, and often destroy the small scraps of paper on which they are written.

I love well-strung words. I am astonished to find them side by side, or in absence of their usual partners. Other ones I am not so fond of. Their very sound makes me shudder or swallow hard. They raise bad memories or ill feelings and I would just as soon they were never spoken again.

Long words, short words, words of questionable ancestry. I like thinking words, blinking words and words that end in y. I like words that I have heard with my own ears. I like God’s words, and I like the space between them–the well-formed, word-empty space of silence.

Comments

[j]

superb!
words strung well together to depict how beautiful and lovely and deep words can be :)

[dale]

(o)

[me]

Beautiful.