What is a word? All I have. I walk down to the park this morning with my old dog. Subject predicate object subordinate clauses, symbolizing but not fully signifying. His ache, his grin, his increasing inability to stand. My fierce joy and heartache and premature grief and impatience, and love that still astonishes me it is so devastating. This is The Year, we said last night, the year his happiness becomes a higher priority than my employment, and if I am late to meetings for matching his labored pace up the hill I know I have chosen the better path to walk. There will be meetings next year, and the next.
What is a word?
They drop notes at me, frustrated and heartfelt. Inadequate, they call them, but what in this world is not? Offers, voiced sighs, stories. What a world, to know a person’s heart but not her face, his voice. The steep and arduous pursuit of love in all its forms. Bonds without descriptors, and me enmeshed in them, and glad to tears.
I am too tied up in words sometimes, too eager to moderate my raw experience. Some things are best described sidelong. A glance is not a word, nor is a tear, nor the bright smile she washed over me last night, nor the smoothness of her face against my chest.
