you are looking at words on the screen

Ironic. I have been thinking, dreaming, weeping for fewer words in my life. And I awake with a desire to write about this growing distaste for words. I laugh softly as I type.

Words are not experience. Words are not my feet walking on the rug. Words are not the sounds of swallows chirping or the roll of tires along Grant Ave. Words are not the smell of coffee brewing. Words are not the sunlight coming to me from behind a cloud bank. Words are not my body awaking with the sun rise and aching to get out of bed.

Words imprint experience into memory. I often remember stories not experience. The events of my childhood that I remember best are the stories that we told again and again, the painful or pleasurable moments that had to be processed. The stories I remember best were captured as photographs and then told again and again when looked through the paper bags full of unsorted photos.

Here are some words and a powerful memory: my father once dropped me from a second story balcony. I don’t know if I remember falling. When I think of the fall I experience an empty place in my solar plexus. Is the experience of the fall this hollowness that spreads from my center? I breathe into the hollowness and feel it spread out to my finger tips and toes, then dissipate into the air around me. I give the hollowness to the air beings to carry away and bury. I do remember telling my therapist the story. I remember weeping over it. I know that when I tell the story to someone I have to brace myself. My body braces to prepare for the hollowness that will open and to prepare for the energy of your reaction. I do not remember the reaction of my parents to the fall.

I find myself yearning to simply watch people, to listen, to not give words to my experience. I find myself yearning to drop the last vestiges of the scientist in me and to stop analyzing observations. I find myself preferring the language of the body unencumbered by words: the language of sound, smell, touch, vision, taste; the language of bird chirp, tires rolling down the street, flavor of coffee, tap of keyboard, green leaves obscuring a cloudy sky, the page in front of my eyes.