The scruffy, bent mailbox at the edge of a junkyard read “U.S. Male” on its side in awkwardly placed letter stickers. I considered it as I blasted by with the evening sun resting on my rear-view mirror. It seemed a bit like an offering for the draft—at this address you may find an able-bodied male of United States citizenship. Ah words, so much power they hold.
They microscopically burn through the skin and disfigure the inner parts. They transform our perceptions of ourselves, sometimes removing our potential. I can feel the tears welling in my eyes, not over the words I have heard—I can take a bit of a burn—but for the ones I’ve said. Guilt: a word that is both pleasantly descriptive and horrible feeling.
And Yet There is so Much Good in Words
That’s where I find my solace—in you. You are always giving me the good in words. Even when the words are a bad subject, like that gnarly beard tarnished to an off-white color as it ambled down the road near that junkyard. It ran halfway down a chest, bedraggled with fragments of its owner’s life on the street. The beard’s owner had a face to match it, deeply marred with wrinkles that displayed mental illness and hate.
He is a terrible person to lay eyes on, but the words somehow save us from him. The words turn him into a character—something that is a part of something bigger, something to be studied and evaluated, instead of something to be avoided. You, my love, are always doing that, and I don’t know how I would cope without it.
How do people cope without turning life into one prolonged and elaborate story? The good times and the bad times, the plot twists of life—won’t they all be lost to a fading old age memory in the end, if they are not preserved as a character in a story? Maybe the memories lost are not so important in the end, but what of the meanings now?
The moral at the end of the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf is don’t lie. What was the moral of my story from yesterday, or sometime last week? If I wasn’t a character in my own story, I might have missed it. It was definitely there, but in the absence of living inside a story it is easy to miss the meaning.
What Does a Writer do When She is Happy or Frustrated?
She writes about it in either celebration or release. The words act as shiny Mylar balloons, or pliers that cut through thick chains. And what does a writer do when she is so disappointed in a way that no amount of autobiographical writing or real life effort can ever resolve it? She writes it up as fiction, and then rewrites the ending, of course.
Everything can be fixed in the world of words. Thank god for you. You’ve fixed so many or my problems, and will fix so many more. Your words write over top of me, straight down me, penetrating the physical realm with the metaphysical, and you complete me.
I don’t know how I would cope with life without you—the writer that lives inside me—and all the other writers out there.
The Sun Blasted into the Rear-view Mirror
It blinded the view of the “US Male” standing in such a crooked, uncomfortable way at the side of the road. I nodded at it, like giving a salute to a ranking officer, because the power of words is something I can fully respect.