I don’t remember falling in love with words.
I just looked around one day and realized I had built my whole life around them.
It wasn’t a whirlwind romance. My eyes didn’t lock into our vernacular across a crowded room. There was no cinematic breathlessness, no pulse-racing ignition that scattered my insides like fireworks.
It was a slow creep.
A curious light that called to me, toyed with me, waited for me. Then it consumed me. It burned me from the inside out. I never saw the spark, never felt the spread, but by the time I had noticed, I was already ash.
These things called words felt like pure magic and I could harness their power. I would unleash them into the world like arrows, like prayers, but never control their trajectory. Before I could shape them, they shaped me. My body reacted before my mind even saw the freight train coming–exciting and terrified. They made my skin tingle and my stomach drop. They broke rooms open and stitched them shut. They swirled around in my mouth, multiplying, growing teeth and wings and thunder. I tossed them carelessly into the aether just to see what would stick. I hoarded them. I spit them out too fast. I massaged them into grandiose shapes, only to watch them be torn apart before landing. They were weapons. Security blankets. Empty vessels. They were everything and nothing, misunderstood and yet more true than anything.
They became me and they crippled me.
And from their inception, they were completely fabricated, like currency. An arbitrary agreement. A fragile social contract pretending to preserve meaning, but held no mutual consensus. What I meant in pure simplicity was received in utter chaos–misunderstood, misaligned, and detonated into despair. The tidal wave of hysteria would turn on me without recourse and suck me into a terrifying spiral, capsizing me. Their meanings, ignorantly believed to be under my ownership, twisted into sails I couldn’t repair and morphed into anchors I couldn’t lift. We would plummet into the abyss. We drowned together.
A tumultuous love affair by all accounts. They betrayed me and I ran to them. They lifted me into euphoria and I ghosted them in return. I consumed them until I disappeared, then outpoured gratitude for finding me in the cage they built. I abandoned them like scraps. I mourned them like an anguished widow.
Song lyrics cradled me like they knew my darkest secrets. Poems wrapped around me like lifelong friends. I was drunk on language before I ever knew alcohol. A stickiness inside my mouth, my tongue rolling over syllables that never quite sounded right, but always felt absolutely true. They watched me martyr them, maim them, worship them, despise them. And they stayed. They learned the voices of my peers. They danced between sophistication and debauchery with the same wild, generous enthusiasm. They wrecked me. Saved me. Named me.
And still, I show up. Mouth open, hands ink-stained. Waiting to be consumed again.
Because what else is left when even silence is shaped by their echo?
