Improved Vocabulary

The first time I called him a lothario, he thought I said lethargic. “What do you mean I’m such a lethargic?” he jokingly asked, lifting me gently in his arms and burying his face in my neck. “I’ll show you.” My vigorous laughter caught him off guard and he nearly dropped me on the floor, right on top of Naobi. Has it really been five years and five thousand miles? He confessed to me several months after we first met in the windowless room of our physical science class that my beauty and diction both intimidated and inspired him. I looked into his guarded hazel eyes, noticing how the traces of green glistened like a pool of algae brimming with life and foam. In that moment I was trapped, powerless to stop myself from drowning in a sincere body of swirling emotions, from sinking into a couple of words uttered by the one person who would redraw the lines of my future and erase the precarious margins keeping me from tumbling headfirst into a world of insanity. I was silent. Then I gathered my books and walked out of the coffee shop, hoping I wouldn’t tumble down the stairs and land in a heap on the landing, because I always like to make a graceful exit. Four months of sitting in aching proximity to each other twice a week, with our notes taking up every inch on those cold lab desks and I couldn’t tell him to stay. I would inhale his potent smell, the heady traces of musk on his smooth skin and feel the dangerous currents radiating from his rugged frame. He knew it was me walking down the hall towards our haven by the sharp sounds my heels made on the slippery floors. I studied every traveled line on his face as if it were an open map, sensing I was foolishly lost and thinking maybe I could find a way out of the desert I had taken a detour into as I was coasting along on a barren, solitary road. He held my shivering body close to him that afternoon, so close I wanted the earth to stop moving underneath my feet if it meant feeling protected from the many reasons why we couldn’t be. All the while, I digested fact upon fact, chapter after chapter in a heavy textbook I couldn’t open long after he walked away, or maybe it was me who fled. Yes. Me. “We would have never been happy with my conscience in the way,” I shouted to the unconcerned wind, but mostly because of his hollow confession on that chilly afternoon. He married the woman after me and now I need to work on my language. The language he idealized and memorialized, waxing poetic and vowing to uphold in the presence of philistines. My words fell flat after we parted ways- I slept a deep sleep and I stopped writing. Three agonizing years of fighting to regain a natural rhythm in my daily activities mundane as they were, and instead of seizing the sad experience by its tail and relying on sweet catharsis to heal my listless soul, I quit words and syntax. They became useless to me and I refused to write one single letter as a form of punishment for what I had done. We saw each other again several months ago, two days before my birthday. We hugged but I didn’t cling to him and I knew I was free. He clasped my hand tightly in his palm and I rested my head on his shoulder. Towards the end of the star lit night, we calmly said our good-byes and went in opposite directions. Five years ago, I thought his ghost would follow me around for the remainder of my bleak days, but time has been my constant companion, taking me away to live out my days as they should be lived: in the presence of creation…never far from the experiences that compel me to write.