Delicate Connections

All of us were silent. Our tongues lay mute, and our brains were confusions of perceptions and emotions, reactions and intuitions. We could, with our ears, hear the aching beauty in the blue silences of early morning. But there were no words for this. We could, with our eyes, see the grace in the skies where the stars slept, vaguely lit by the moon. But there were no words for this. We could, with our skin, feel the warmth from the dip of the sun, not as a science, but as a nest of mad kisses across our bodies. But there were no words for this. There were no words for anything at all. 

And so we were yearning, always yearning. We looked into the eyes of others, and these looks spanned a thousand miles, but held nothing. There was no boat to bridge the chasms between all the separate isles of ourselves. No meaning that could cross the vast and tempestuous waters. And so we felt our very existences trembling with desire for such a vehicle that could leap gently from isle to isle and sharpen the fuzziness between us all.

Who, of all of us, could have imagined that the world — the fires, the sands, the perspectives, the abstractions — could be contained in such mere shards? In dewdrops? 

“Words, words, words!” would say one Danish prince in a later story. 

And yet they came. From where, nobody knows. Words like abalone, and caprice, and pantomime came tap dancing to improvised jazz through all of our minds. Words like puddle and turbulence and contradiction skidded and glanced across our intuitions like the skipping stone. Words like orchestral and vermillion and serendipity slid along the curves of our thoughts, fitting the contours of our minds, and undulating as liquid water in a twisting parallel. They crept along our desires, and they sunk into our fears, and they rose with our petty wonderings. 

From where had they come? We all stood shell-shocked as our same perceptions and emotions, reactions and intuitions took the form of words. And so we pounced on these words and wrestled them to the ground and sometimes held a gun up to their heads and asked, if we may, for the truth. We sipped them up through plasticky straws and swirled them around on our tongues and puckered our lips. We held certain beautiful words, the enchantresses, with trembling hands like so many diamonds. 

And without knowing how or why, we used them. We went up to others and showed them the words we had found, and others did the same to us. There was overlap, there was overflow, and we made acquaintance with the mad divinity of communication. We plucked words from glorious conversations and wove them into flower crowns and wore them like giddy children. We, as a people, were drunk, we were foolish, we were aware, and we were sublime. We used words, and strands of coldness and warmth, cruelty and passion, roses and metal seeped from our human tongues and glided around the Equator. Finally, here, was hope. We were all delicately connected. We had gleefully tied themselves together with ropes of shared syllables. Oh lovely euphony! Oh potency of permutation! It is our story that allowed all others.