“Words”

I became intimate with “Words,” during my infancy… “

Words” became my first playmate, my best friend, my confidante…

Tottering around my childhood home, I learned to utilize “Words” expeditiously, speaking in phrases, bypassing the seemingly nonsensical, monosyllabic utterances rendered by other youth in my age demographic…

I strung together sentences beneath the exuberant tutelage of my professionally educated mother. My fascination with “Words’s” intricate design, graduated quite expediently from oral regurgitation to verbal origination.

I developed my own form of cuneiform, with a toddler’s flourish, patiently perfecting the tenuous link between that which is “said,” and that, which is “written.”

I become the author of my life, ostensibly mastering my fate.

Sculpted letters became sound, to which I attached meaning, that metastasized into paragraphs, which elongated into pages that became rudimentary expressions of my talent.

I watched others struggle to conjugate verbs, while I entertained invitations to join Advanced Placement Literacy classes.

I wrote my first book at five (unpublished), and continued throughout my childhood into early adulthood, regaling eager listeners and readers with unpublished pieces of authentic literary work that gained me notoriety as an innocuous, yet brilliant, burgeoning authorette.  

I preened at their commentary, reveling in the knowledge that my Purpose in life was birthed from my kinship with “Words.” Be they spoken or written, I was never without them…

Until… …My daddy died, and “Words” failed me.

The betrayal was as instantaneous as it was crippling. How to adequately put into “Words” my shock…? My anger…? My disgust…?

How could I aptly convey my desolation…my fear…the sense of abandonment that now blanketed my security?

The absence of “Words” was noticeably offensive because of the devastation left in its wake…

We were no longer in tandem, because I NEVER gave permission for “Words” to bring into the corporal plane that which I would not even entertain through errant thought.

I never sanctioned my father’s death!

“Words” must be spoken into existence so that THAT which was NOT could be brought to fruition!

I didn’t give “Words” my permission…

My life force, intertwined with “Words” since my beginning…stuttered, abandoning me to a confusing emptiness that would not allow my to shape sound beyond the metaphorically silent scream of my transfixed lips.

My somber mien did not reflect my new reality…

Because the day my daddy died I lost more than my father; I lost my connection to the Son…

My identity, my self-expression, the salve for every anguish I’d ever sustained, lay in my ability to express myself thru “Words.”

Through “Words” I connected my soul to the spiritual plane.

Through “Words” I accessed God…

As I gazed at my father’s inert form, lying so achingly prone in his hospital bed, I tried to process that his body was not the only one in the room suddenly absent a soul…

I, too, had become an untenanted shell of what was once whole.

October Rising – I am a former aspiring author who decided to parlay a hobby into a profession.  Teaching is what I do; writing is who I am…