Words

I am won with words.
I am won with vocabulary and passion and intensity.
I am won with style and grace.

This is probably why I had such a mad crush on Hemingway when I saw Midnight in Paris: Words.

There is an art in words and their conveyance that has nearly vanished in this age of textlish and emails. There is no flow, no ink on paper, no creases in a folded and unfolded page over which one can trace a fingertip time and time again. It makes me sad.
And yes, I see the irony of putting that in a blog.

I want love letters. I want to hear the things small children say when they learn or experience something new. And I want all the words to be beautiful and scary and honest and true; I want them to have resonance and touch something in my soul. I want to be moved, if only for a moment. I want a story I can tell someone else. More words.

I like the way it feels to say certain words and, like Tolkien’s “cellar-door” or Poe’s “nevermore”, I find myself adrift in the euphonies.

Words are all around us. We are swimming in mindless correspondence and conversations; inundated with status updates, tweets and texts. But where is the beauty in that? Where is the substance?

There are extensive records from the past in journals and letters; whole archives that show us, in words, what life was like in times we can never see. So, how will our digital generation of deep thoughts no longer than 140 characters be remembered?

Words are powerful. Use them wisely.

_

Sometimes I am a hopeless cynic.

One year ago, this week, I had my first serious brush with death; I was diagnosed with bilateral pulmonary emboli. That makes now a very good time to be honest about my life.

This year, I have a new boyfriend, MJ. He’s fantastic: smart, funny, attractive… However, since I’m being honest, I think he’d probably prefer a provincial, winsome woman who loves big, untrained dogs and has a “career, not just a job”– even if she hates it. In my head, this woman comes in a petite brunette package despite the fact that MJ has historically shown a penchant for redheads.

I have no job– none to speak of, anyway. This, of course, leads to having no money and, very soon, no place to live.

And anyone who reads this blog already knows about 7/7.

I must say, in many ways, last year seems to have been easier. I am glad I survived, but I have spent a very large portion of the past twelve months wondering why I did. This is infinitely complicated by the fact that all of the things I thought I was surviving for last year have, in essence, disappeared.

I guess I am doing what everyone does when they are forced to start over, but I’ve run out of steam. I need a break– just one good thing to happen to jumpstart everything else.

In the myth of Pandora’s Box (or Jar, depending on who is asked) all of the bad things come into the world before Hope. Perhaps Hope just moves more slowly and it will arrive in my life any day now. I’d like to believe that, but believing in a thing doesn’t make it so.

I believed my love life was headed somewhere very different from where I am now. I believed I would have a job and everything would be stable again. I truly believed that PE would be the worst thing to happen to me…

Nobody likes to be wrong.