Words

The heavy heat had been trapping itself in her little apartment all week. Refusing to selfishly pull energy from the world to cool the whole apartment, she enclosed herself in her bedroom every night around 10 PM and faced the guilt of turning on the AC.

Though they were there for her when she woke that morning, she had deferred savoring his letters all day. She waited for the moment where she could lay in her bed and read his confessions, his observations, his heart, his bourbon, his way, his day. She loved the way the words sat next to each other in his sentences. In their aggregate and as separate individuals, their external forms, shapes and sounds and their internal meanings described exactly who he was at the moment he wrote them. Together they formed an essence. A person. It was like she was both drinking him and the distilled him simultaneously. The line between the two was neither pivotal nor intelligible for her. Was he first or his words?

She read them and her heart covered her skin, expanded and spread as rapidly as an earnest cancerous cell making a crackling sound and covering her brown skin so that the world no longer existed. Dates, inventions, time, age, people, weather, it was all gone. It was an infinite moment with his words and her mind. They straddled each other, walked away from each other, sat across the room from each other, fought with each other, and finally jumped into each other’s arms.

She adjusted her pillows and turned off the AC, it was too loud. Staring at the computer, she felt immense love but equally colossal distance. They, she and him, were words-immaculately meaningful and desperately vapid. He was not there, they were not in real time, they didn’t share life, they described it. Even so, she couldn’t resist the fact that this edited exchange was the foremost authentic dialogue of her life. She paused and began to write him.

She woke with her hands still on the keyboard. The light was on; the computer was hot and begging her to shut it down, but staying awake in case she could do more. She sent whatever words were there on the screen to him. He would understand. He knows her. She couldn’t rise to the occasion of his outpour, but he would know she loved it, although her words did not match it.

She turned off the light.