The Weight of it All

At age 5 or 6,
the witch in my story book,
after hatching some kind of hair-brained plan,
said something like this;

That's so crazy...
it just might work!

And I thought and thought about what a funny thing that was to say. And I thought and thought about the words she chose and

how they matched, but also how they didn't.

And it made me stop,
and file it away,
in tiny wonderment of the
possible playfulness of words.

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May 2006:
I took a trip.
From Kansas City to Osaka, Japan.

Mother tongue abandoned,
I thought that I'd feel free.
With no possibility of being forced into meaningless chit-chat or other-worldly discussions that always seem to knock my feet off of familiar earth-ground,
my anxieties were quieted.

Walking that strange cement the first few days, I was free to be just "she" or "her", and enjoy the sun and the water and the ground.
And then walking that strange cement my last few days the ground seemed to repel me, as I found myself missing the weight of words.

May 2006:
I took a trip.

From Kansas City to Osaka, Japan.

They showed me words like arigato, and kon'nichiwa
and I would speak them, but always with that same repellant feeling in my mouth. That mush-mouthed feeling of, You don't belong here.

And soon I was missing my familiar thank you and hello.
Words that didn't need to sit in my mouth before being pronounced or defined or translated. And these remembrances twisted around in my heart and reminded me of the weight of it all.

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I was never good at doing active kid things at recess on the playground.
In the classroom I felt like I was more apart of my class, but on the playground
I was more like the strange child on the sidelines.

Separate.

So when Morgan-wavy-haired-cool-girl came along,
I bowed down.
But when she decided to tell Ronnie-blue-eyes-cool-guy
that he made my heart beat so fast and my cheeks go so red,
I flipped out.

I remember my fists
that had clamped onto her shirt so fiercely so that
when she tried to run, the cotton had stretched and pulled.
But I was no match for Morgan-wavy-haired-cool-girl,
and she got her way.

I stood watching her skip carelessly
toward my Ronnie-blue-eyes-cool-guy
for just one second.
I couldn't watch for long, my mingled pride and dread
made me turn my back, ever so casually,
just as if I couldn't care less about what she was about to do.

She returned,
grinning, laughing,
with a report.
What had he said about me?
He had said;
Disgusting!

That word,
the worst news of my 9 year-old life.
That word,
like a punch in the nose
that makes your eyes
water down your red, red cheeks...

That word.

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"At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing, or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding, or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused not everywhere the same...The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World". Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."

"Teaching a Stone to Talk" -Annie Dillard