on words

Words can be likened to water bodies. 

To temperamental water bodies.

Sometimes they ebb and flow like the tides on average days.

Flat, monotone, unprovoking. Like listening to the evening news.

Sometimes they crash like raging waves on the cliffs.

Thunderous, stormy, unrelenting. Like champagne bursting forth from a well-shaken bottle.

Sometimes they’re akin to a lazy river.

Taking their time, teasing and evading those who try to catch them. 

And sometimes, they’re absolutely impossible to pin down. 

They can surprise you with their magnificence one day and baffle you with their sparsity the next. They can give and give so much but suddenly pull away without a reason, leaving you (very literally) speechless.

Words are a marvel.

They are also oxymorons. 

In sentences and paragraphs they reside alone together. 

Yes, they might form temporary coalitions but they each have a separate existence.

Words too are much like people in that sense; each a unique personality but bunched together so tightly sometimes you cannot tell where one ends and another begins. 

My philosophy? Grab onto them when they’re in one of their happier, more giving moods. Embrace them, collaborate, and create memories that you can later fondly look upon. 

The world is your easel and words are your technicolour palette; the hues are brilliant and ceaseless.

I cannot stress how important it is to absolutely lock them down when they do occur to you. This could happen in the middle of the night or maybe during a particularly intense crying jag. But if you feel them tickling the edges of your brain- even through all the exhaustion and the agony and the tears streaking down- write. You could remember the idea in the morning but the words will not do justice to it. Nothing could be more frustrating than your mind insisting “EUREKA” but the words just won’t come. 

However, there will be times when they will refuse to fit into those neat little labelled boxes you’ve created in your head. And when that happens?  Let go. 

Give them room to be true to their flighty, boisterous selves and do their own thing. The worst thing you can do is force them to comply. Force yourself to make it so that they fall into  the perfect lines, because you believe you’ve mastered the art. Words are not puppets. 

They are free-flowing spirits- they could just as easily embody a myriad of emotions as they could abandon it all to curl up in a thesaurus. 

Words challenge you to be the best, most aware version of yourself. Ever been in a situation where you’re racking your brains for that one word you use all the time but suddenly just cannot seem to remember? There’s your challenge.

Chances are that word is just hovering around the edges of your brain, teasing and taunting you. Seeming to come within grasp and skirting around just as you think you got it. 

If this happens way too often then, yes, perhaps you have dementia. 

But it is most likely that it’s just words being words.

Let them be.