Words
I’m not a writer like Toby or Sam, but I’ve always loved words.
That probably explains why it happened, that right there; she just wouldn’t shut up.
That sounds worse than I mean it. Just because I love them doesn’t mean that the words always come out right.
Anyway, I love words.
There’s nothing as beautiful as a well-placed put down. Nothing as thrilling as wordplay as a game. And there’s nothing as devastating as the right turn of phrase at the right moment.
Take this for example: “Do you wanna take a walk… or something.”
Out of context, it’s a nothing special. It’s not smart or erudite. In the context of the most maddeningly day in my whole life though… Wow.
After years of heavy words, lightly thrown… It’s those simple words that really kick me in the guts. On a day where I wasn’t doing all that well with words, she had the all the right ones.
But then there were too many. To be honest, quite a few of them were shouted by me. It took someone, far better with words than I am, to find the right ones to make it stop.
There’s nothing as eye opening as a well worded threat.
And now – seeing her naked in the setting Hawaiian sun – there are no words at all. None that can make it out of my mouth anyway. There is the voice in the back of my brain screaming “What the hell are you doing here with me?! How did I get this lucky?”
But who needs words when you can finally look without feeling embarrassed about getting caught? And who needs words when you can finally reach out and touch without fear?
And then it seems that Donna, loquacious Donna, just can’t seem to stop saying my name. I get it… I just can’t stop saying hers either. It’s like a spell, dumb as it sounds, an invocation if you will, and if we just keep saying it enough then maybe it’ll be an anchor and make this crazy thing real.
I say it with a smile, with a laugh, on a whisper, in wonder, in surprise, in joy, softly, loudly… and yelling it to the heavens above.
Afterwards, knowing us, you might think we’d talk. Maybe we’d talked so much already that we’d used up all the words in the world. We didn’t need charts or graphs or polling data to compare the map of our relationship from start to here. You don’t need to do an autopsy on something that’s not dead.
We both wear our scars.
It’s amazing how much can be said with interlaced fingers, and lost, who knows how long, spent looking into someone’s eyes.
Words do come back eventually. We wouldn’t be us if they didn’t. We swim, and eat, and dance, and talk. And oh god, she talks! It’s like the Olympics of talking! She knows everything! Volcanoes and plant life and animals! And I’m ready to tie her to the bed and gag her, not in a kinky way, just to get her to stop already!
Except that I love it.
The sound of her voice, which I’d missed so much. I stare at her mouth, just because I can.
Which, when she notices, leads back to the sex.
The shower sex, the noisy sex, the tender sex, the fast sex, the ‘we’ve got all night’ sex, the up against the wall sex, the covert outside sex, the ‘are we really having this dumb conversation while having’ sex!
It’s not until the last day that she lets me watch C-SPAN, and we add a new one to the list: the ‘during White House press briefing’ sex… and we may never be able to face Will without blushing ever again. We come up with outlandish strategies for how to avoid him for the rest of the transition.
I love words, and I love Donna. I think she already knows, but, one day, I’ll find the words to say it. For now, I’ll just put my arm around her and let her sleep, as we go home.
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