Letters in Ink

Everyone collects something. Some people collect money; some people collect friends, some people collect power or wishes or even just something like shells or marbles or old worn down coins or books. She collects some of those things, and a great many others- storiessongsdreamwisecracksbooksmemories- but mostly words.

She collects words she doesn't know the meaning of- cochineal, isabelline, acquisitions. These are words she thinks must have a beautiful meaning behind them, because they sound so beautiful, or this word is so sleek and neatly contained it must be something intimidating or something to do with warfare, or maybe this one is a type of cat, because it seems to curl up on the page, purring and stripes contained in the slim lines of ink. These words are words she holds for only a short time, just guesses that she later throws away like skipping stones against the water of a lake, but sometimes she keeps them, if the meaning and word twist and tangle together beautifully, or somehow catches her fancy. 

She collects fragments of sentences, things of her own making, or stolen things, like puzzle pieces of a puzzle that isn't quite done yet. Blood beauty, tumbleweed sadness, fiddle twist. These oddities are puzzle pieces, but also puzzles in themselves; she has to figure out what they mean for herself, before she can use them. 

She also likes those whose meaning she knows. Candle, ramble, elope, spur, riddle. She likes these, that like smoothly polished wood, fit so well into their meaning that they seem to fit the essence of the word so well they are one and the same. 

(When they don't fit quite properly, she'll sometimes try them out in different languages. Hello sounds a bit too hollow in English (hollow, by the way, if you didn't know, fits it's meaning quite well), but kon'nichiwa fits it much better. Conqueror is not as good as conquistador, water is not as good as momoli, breeze (though quite good) is not quite as good as avra, and rock does not embody it's meaning- but petra does. 

Sometimes it's more fun to make up a word and figure out what it means. Snittle is like a snitch, but not only that, someone who is so of fear- fear and a sniffling inability to do anything of any worth by themselves. (Peter Pettigrew is a snittle.) Sarumpa is a much nicer one. She's not sure of the exact meaning, but she does know it's a quite nice word and has a such meaning; it's a bit odd, but quite nice, perhaps having to do with old tea leaves or bits of clockwork worn as necklaces. Dorn is a grittier word; hard working and fierce, bold and prideful (pride is purple, if you did not know; but so is fear.) 

Words are the best of things to collect, she has discovered. In the words of Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, "the great thing about collecting words is they're free; you can them borrow them, trade them in or toss them out. I'm trading in (and literally composting) some of my other collections-driftwood, acorns, and bits of colored Easter egg shell- for words. Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they're everywhere." The one thing is, lightweight or no, they're hard to keep and carry. 

They're so light they fly off from your hands like gently fluttering birds. Turn your back and they'll be gone; forgotten and hidden. She scrawls them on her arms and tucks them in her notebook and tastes them on the tip of her tongue as they slip away, as they slither through her fingers like someone trying to hold water (momoli) in their hands. 

She stores them in neat little sentences, locks them away, sets them loose in poems, weaves them into a world. They become the plot, they are the suspense, they are that character. And yet if you look closely enough you can see the thousand other things that word is, was, could be. Words are odd and beautiful things that way. So much more than letters or ink and paper, words are.

Citation: the quotation and some of the concepts are from POEMCRAZY by Susan G. Wooldridge, copyright 1996