The Problem with My Words

Fashion Show 

by Hannah Hoch

In the beginning

I was told

They were much too few.

Too hushed.

Too reluctant.

Barely enough to be healthy for a growing girl like me.

Embrace the world, they cheered me on.

Speak up!

They were still kind to me back then

Gazing down at me, amused perhaps

At the little girl with a fixed smile and no words.

As the words grew,

They grew to be selective

To people and to places.

I managed, in the smallest of circles, to crack a joke sometimes and at other times, wrench quite admirably, arguments in my favor.

I was regarded alternately, the clown and the sage.

But those fringed outside my orbit

Grudged me for what they thought was pride.

And then the time came 

When I fell in love

Like most young people tend to do

And I unearthed a spring of words

Deep within

Of which I never knew.

And they spurted and gushed onto lips and scented paper,

Sometimes stale, but sometimes true.

But even these words after their brief day in the sun

Were shunned as actually, a bit overdone.

You used them more intensely than you meant them, he concluded.

At least in hindsight, they seem a bit too much.  

How could anyone have remained untouched?

How could anyone not repeat after you,

as if in a trance,

a trance not brought on by you per se,

but by those words you so effortlessly wielded?

So, in your interest, for your future, he prescribed,

Take a good long moment before you utter one of your dear beloved words and go along strewing sentence after sentence and fooling in the bargain, poor souls into something they did not want all along. Maybe, do not trust all the words, bubbling into your mind. Cast them aside. And say the bare minimum. Understate always, if you have to declare anything at all.

So I scribbled secretly

my words

into frayed old notebooks

and deserted virtual walls

and even those that escaped my lips

I made sure were snipped to fit, what I thought, was the bill. 

But the commentary wouldn’t stop.

Friends occasionally noted their glossy artifice

And how I made the ordinary sound pretty.

Or remarked disdainfully of their dull propriety.

And one dear one even declared how in the end, they were all quite irrelevant.

I am these days,

Most uncertain about these most dearest of my possessions

While I trust them less and less each passing day

I have also come to believe for certain

That these moody words of mine,

Swimming restlessly like a cloud of tadpoles within me,

Are the only thing that can and will show me the way.