Words Between Words

Words Between Words

You’ve got me thinking about love.

She introduced herself in (with) that one sentence. A woman I never would have met (as one can electronically meet someone) if not for Twitter. We discovered a shared interest in sci fi TV and ripping at wounds until they bleed dry. She sends out Twitter poems, or maybe she sends out daydreams, but the words she sends out are careful.

Peering back and forth at one another on the Internet, or through an app on my iPhone, is like looking through a multilayer kaleidoscope of perception and projection. Like. I hate using like as a word of comparison. Similes and metaphors have no place in proper writing. Proper writing. What is proper writing? Like pornography, I know proper writing when I see it. Can you see words? You can certainly read words, but sometimes, these words we read, they need to be seen, and these words we see, they need to be ingested. Language is, for better or worse, radioactive. Words have half-lives.

What is the half-life of a word, or of a story? The length of time the word, the story, remains remembered? Hardcover gives way to paperback gives way to electronic reproductive gives way to a series of ones and zeroes, breaking down your words into readable code. If I could write a bestseller using only ones and zeroes, I would, if only to say that I once wrote a bestseller. Because the point is for little words to turn into big words or just somehow make sense.

I once loved a boy that didn’t love me back, not even in my bed did that boy love me back. I once loved a girl that lied to everyone but me. Then I turned into everyone. I wanted to know who everyone was, and she said all of you, and I cried.

Twitter poems.

Each line, a universe, and each universe, a world unlike the one before. Would you even want to revisit a behind-you world? You already know its ending, whether meteor struck or still there, plump but hollow. Decayed(ing) buildings have half-lives. You once inhabited these buildings, these lives, people, love, but you were simply a trespasser. Once a lot of decay happens, nothing to do but vacate. Leave the termites behind as quickly and as easily as you must leave behind your heart.

Alas.

No one taught me how to recognize the sound of a breaking heart. I never heard a sound. Yet I know my heart is breaking.

Tweeted, then retweeted. Absorbed.

Some words are not yours. Some words belong to someone else. Just hope you do these words that belong to someone else justice.

Write what you know, they all used to say when I didn’t know enough to argue. And I’d write about angles: spines, jaws, heels, and then I’d write about your curves: cheeks, knees, elbows. And you’d ask me what to make of it and I’d say something fierce about leaving behind fingerprints, etching forever in your skin, a tattoo reminder of where I’d been and what we found there.

I knew you by your charged atoms, leaving the hair on my arms erect. Be open with me, you asked, not knowing exactly what you were asking, and I said I was as open as I could be, and you said that that opening was too small to fit in. Seep through, I said. Go through me like bullet holes (a line from a song; more words that do not belong to me).

These words, my words and her words and their words, fill, but without projected meaning, are empty. Turn off the lights. Kiss someone until your lips are chapped and red and the only words you can use are no words, and these no words are the loudest words, and these words can be shared, albeit less easily than you share your life.

Because I know what words can do to me when wielded carelessly, I’m careful of the words I give to others.

Giving words to others. Another reason to like her, and not just in a Facebook kind of way.

She calls herself a poet, yet doesn’t share her lines. A line in the sand. Don’t take my words, she might say, or has said, at least to one man. He wanted her words, her love poems, and she didn’t have the words to say that she loved him like poetry he couldn’t understand.

I’ll more than likely never meet her, and, if pressed, I don’t even know where she lives, but through her words, I feel like we’ve shared an ocean, and together we are the salt and the heat and the life living beneath, and we are sea form and seahorses and seaweed. We are sand dollars. We are sand.