To Fall in Love With Words

When I was six, I fell in love.

I was glueing words onto flashcards for kindergarten English class, big words, small words, one-letter words that were smooth on the sturdy cardstock. A, the, we, today, together, forever, tomorrow, gone. You, me, blink, end, here, now, then, there. When I was done, I took the cards with sticky fingers and spread them out in a big circle on the floor and stared at them for a while, until every time I closed my eyes I saw white rectangles and black type floating around. That was when I knew I was hopelessly in love.

There’s something about words, about the little strings of letters that does something to your mind, draws you in by the scent of wonder. Something that builds a picture, like the little pieces of plastic film that you stick into an instant camera. You string them together, and click, flash, BAM: there’s a marvelously meticulous masterpiece, down to that reflection in your eye. I have fireworks of words dancing behind my eyelids, fabrics of phrases sparking sweetly on my tongue. But I think my favorite few, the ones that blink brighter, are: mellifluous, solitude, and hiraeth.

Mellifluous: a noise, a voice, a note, that’s musical. Pleasant. Iridescent, with swirling rainbow colors that aren’t too bright, just a delightful, simmering soup inside a soap bubble. It’s the aurora of sounds. The dawn. The echo of the sun setting in the back of your head over the glimmering ocean when the wind is exhaling, just barely. A sigh.

I met mellifluous when I heard the man in the park on the piano.

Ma and I had gone out to have a picnic, which is what we did every Sunday afternoon on the green at our little town center on the outskirts of New York City. Dad never came to the picnics. Just Ma and I, the two of us, were sitting on the blue blanket that I always liked to imagine was silk or velvet or something fancier than cotton. We were sipping lemonade in plastic cups, which was funny because we’d forgotten the picnic basket so we just bought food at a stand, which takes the point out of the picnic because a picnic is a bring-your-own food sort of thing.

There was a piano in the middle of the green, on the plaza. It was dusty and old and supposed to be white but had aged into greyness and had gum stuck all over the bottom of the chairy. I guess the Town Board thought it’d look nice. Or that people would play it, maybe. But they didn’t. It just sat there, listening to the breeze with keys hungry, starving, waiting for the stroke of a finger and the ring of a sweet, high note, for a moment to sing long and deep. There was a mic by the piano, too, a tall one that was always plugged in and open but never inviting because it was by the forgotten piano so it had to be forgotten, too. 

I was sitting there on that lemonade Sunday, watching the piano blankly when the man began to play.

I don’t remember what he looked like, how tall he was, what he was wearing or if he was poor or rich or smiling or not. But I remember the music.

It was mellifluous. Beautiful. It poured into my hollow bones like pastel oil, lit my skin with iridescent, ethereal light, twirled me into oblivion. His singing, deep and earth-shaking and rich, I can still remember. I can still remember how the wind stopped exhaling, and the sun stopped beating down, and how Ma stopped sipping her lemonade and a few people walking by and a couple pigeons stopped to listen too. I can still remember the words that he sang, the words that fluttered into my ears and stuck there, the words that are still stuck, echoing on, on:

Life ... is but a twinkling of an eye

Yet filled with sorrow and compassion

Though not imagined all things that happen

Will age too old

Though gold

Stay gold

“He’s quite good, isn’t he?” Ma said. “That’s a Stevie Wonder song, I think, did you know?”

I didn’t say anything. 

For a long time after that, I’d skip around the playground at school telling everyone that my favorite word was gold, and then it was twinkling and then it was eye, and then I decided that none of those felt quite right in my water-vapor bones. Mellifluous. That was the right word. I had to lug a big, dusty blue dictionary out of the school library during lunch to find it.

Mellifluous. 

Mellifluous.

It still sounds perfect.

I met solitude in the mountains.

Solitude has three syllables; solitude is that subtly delicious silence of being alone. It’s a word that smells like pale blue and petrichor, the scent of living, dozing red earth after a rain shower. It’s the quiet euphoria of a pluviophile, a rain-lover, dancing and twirling in a spring shower alone for no real reason at all, not needing a partner. Dancing just because.

Dad and Ma took me to the Watkins Glen State Park in Upstate New York when I was ten; we spent some time talking Dad into coming, and he did, eventually. I’d never gone hiking before, ever, except for in the hills of our town and once a few steps up the White Mountains before a thunderstorm cut me off. Half an hour in, Dad got tired and went back to the car, which he and Ma fought about, but the fight wasn’t as bad as usual; it was over quick. And then Ma and I, we hiked all afternoon. Even though we’d only brought two bottles of water and a hat each. By the time we took a break we were starving and sunburnt and it was five, six o’ clock with the sun sinking down. I was so sweaty and sticky and worn out that I lied down there on the ground right in the dirt while Ma sat on a rock and sipped what was left of her plastic-bottle water. There was some feeling there, in that place, that made me see. It made me feel, everything: Ma’s love, the quiet, the alone-ness, not alone.

To the right of the dirt where I was lying face-down, there was a flat clearing of smooth, grey square rocks that got cut off by a tan wall which was only as tall as I was—so, very short. There was the thinnest layer of silver water running over the squares like a smooth hand, a caress, without misty spray because it was moving slowly, almost still, shyly slipping downstream. It pooled into a tiny little waterfall that was so miniscule you couldn’t make out its trickle among the rustling of leaves and the noise of the resting sun. And the sun’s pink rays hit the water just so, just right, so that it was clear and cloudy at the same time. Little shimmering pink-orange fish were there, but not, wading all about and over each other, exploding over the rocks. 

“Are you okay?” Ma asked. She was watching me, and then the water. “Wow. It’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Here, it reminds me of a poem—if I can remember it.” She cleared her throat:

The common pass

Where, clear as glass,

All must descend

Not to an end,

But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave,

Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.

“A nice poem, isn’t it?” she said when she’d finished. “It’s called ‘The Waterfall’.”

“It’s sad,” I said. “The rocky grave. It sounds like death. Like The End.”

“Mm. And the course more bright and brave, d’you think that’s sad, too?”

I didn’t say anything. I watched the shimmering sunset in the water. There was something off in the air; I thought I could see the piano in Ma’s eyes, the music on her face, some rustling unrest in her gaze. I pretended not to see it, and it was gone.

Hiraeth is not an English word. It’s a Welsh word. It’s a longing for home, only deeper, sweeter, more ancient, and there’s no English word to describe that honeysuckle bitter-sweet chocolate feeling of missing a place you ran away from, so I have to use the Welsh word for it. It makes me wonder if that’s because we don’t have that sort of thing here. We don’t miss home; we’re always running away, running far off into what we think is the sunset, the concrete wall painted orange-pink. Or maybe we don’t know home. Or don’t have it.

I fell in love with hiraeth when It happened.

I don’t like to talk about It. But maybe, maybe if I just play it all back in my mind on a wide screen and draw you up a chair, you can watch It with me, so I won’t have to speak and you can drink it down all the same and It won’t come pouring out of my eyes.

There are three things you should know before I press play. 

The first is that we lived in a little town on the outskirts of New York City, which I have told you already but you might’ve forgotten, because people tend to forget things like that. Armonk. That’s what it was called; I almost can’t remember now. It was a long time ago. Armonk, that was the town where me and Ma sat on the green in our little town center and had picnics every Sunday, the town with the stay gold piano in the plaza. Not far from the Watkins Glen State park where I saw the unrest in Ma’s soul. It’s funny, how I remembered Armonk fine when I told you about it a couple minutes ago, but I can hardly remember it now. Armonk. The name’s a stranger already.

The second thing is, Ma worked in the City, New York City, and she drove there every day—it was an hour away, I think. She was an employee for AON Insurance. Hated her job—more, if it was possible, than TVs and the giant advertising screens in Times Square. She would burn her desk with a scarlet flamethrower if she could, watch the ashes float away. But Dad was going a couple years without work, so she couldn’t burn it, unless she wanted to burn us up and see us crinkle in the flames, too.

The third thing is that Ma and Dad were divorced by that time. About eighteen years ago—it’s hard to remember how it all went. Some meetings with a lawyer, some signing of papers, buying a house, me packing some things and leaving others, forgetting my words in the small, dusty attic and trading them for hollowness. It had been long coming, so I wasn’t too phased. Just more empty, like the void had grown. I was split between two houses, ripped in half, so I was only half myself sometimes and other times the other half was in me. Dad bought another house, a smaller one, got a job as a computer programmer where he stared at a screen all day, typing and clicking and blinking emptily. If Ma had been put in that computer room, she would’ve gone insane, gouged her eyes out, pulled out the flamethrower and burned the whole darn thing to ashes. But she was still an employee at AON Insurance, in New York City, one hour away.

Oh, and there’s another thing, a fourth thing I haven’t told you. About the time and place It happened.

Ma worked in the World Trade Center on the 98th floor. And It happened on September 11th, 2001.

It was a week that I was at Dad’s place, his small grey house on the deserted backstreet of Woodstock. He’d taken to going straight to the living room after work and staring at the TV, letting the hours swim by as the news played, the sitcoms, the talk shows, not really having anything seep into his mind but just suck out his thoughts and wash over his eyes like mud. He’d been gaining weight, eating without caring, without thinking, without being hungry or being full; having something in his mouth always and the screen in his face always was the combination that, click, pulled his plastic puzzle piece from the rest of the world and let it float, not in solitude, but something more crude and metallic. Abandonment. 

I’d been doing nothing much at the table, a little homework here, drink a cup of tea there, write down a list of words somewhere, and then there was a small, quiet sound, an intake of breath, a choke in the back of a throat, that tore me away from my words. 

In the living room, there was Dad, sitting straighter than I’d ever seen him, mouth gaping, eyebrows pushing at each other, fighting for a spot, eyes cracking, heart frozen in the blue light. He held a soda can in his hand, and as I opened my mouth to ask jokingly if he was having a heart attack, the can went, thunk, to the carpeted floor. Brown liquid bled. And then I saw the television, the news playing, low volume:

“It’s 8:52 here in New York, I’m Bryant Gumbel and we understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. The plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, and we don’t know anything more…”

I stared. An image, in fuzzy, shaking color, stabbing, exploding across the screen: the Center, acrid black smoke billowing out, death in the air, the sky full of smog and the crowds of people below, staring, gathering, mouths wide, no one daring to move, no one knowing who or why or how. The whole top of the building shadowed with towering clouds, clouds thirsty for something, for lives, to drink down and be forgotten. And people in there, in the buildings, not in the picture, but screaming, shrieking, flashing lights, burning bodies, running, tripping, falling, blinking out. I fell to my knees, the sea of soot washed over me, hacking, choking, all silent.

Five minutes later:

“...American Airlines Flight 11, evacuation of north tower underway, emergency services have been sent in to help…”

Run, Ma. Get out. Get help. Take the stairs, the elevator won’t work. Don’t jump, grow wings, find a way, come back home, hug me again, smile in the waterfall.

Twenty minutes:

“A second plane crash into the south tower, United Airlines Flight 175...freak accident or planned attack?”

Dad sweating, eyes dried out, mouth blackened, face marble, hands clenched. Me staring, praying, no heartbeat, standing there with her in the ashes, with Ma. Dodge the fire, Ma, don’t get burned, I’ll carry you down to the 97th floor, the 96th, the 1st, hold your breath and I’ll hold mine, squeeze through the frantic crowds and run, Ma. Run far away and over the water; come back home to me and be here for this Sunday’s picnic and if you come back to me I’ll play the piano for you and read you a poem and never let you down again. 

One hour:

“Towers not stable—death count rises to 700, injuries 1,000…”

Run, Ma, run through the woods and past the roads and atop the wind and knock on the door, pick me up and twirl me around. Run Ma, and when you get home we’ll hike into the sunset together, I’ll give you my words, the solitude and mellifluous and the hiraeth and everything in between. I’ll throw them away for you, for you, forget them and burn them to ashes so we can cry together for the smoke on the screen and be sad for them, but not you, not you.

90 minutes:

“...Third attack…Death toll rises to 1,500, injured 3,000...”

Run, Ma, run down the street and past your house and through the divorce papers, erase the signature, come home and let’s be together, let’s eat together, let’s talk together and laugh, I’ll spread the white note cards with black type on the table and we’ll string words together and make new worlds for each other like we used to. We’ll sing songs and play board games and I’ll blow poems on the air for you, turn your ears to gold, give you a diamond-studded crown…

“...Towers have collapsed.”

And I fell to the ground, weeping, heart empty and stone, all shadow and cold, rock and gravel, dust and sand. Buried alive in the deep and rocky grave.

All dark.

In the dark, my voice: It’s OK, Ma.

Don’t worry, Ma. 

I’m alright, Ma. Don’t worry about me.

And in the back of my mind, a last memory belonging to someone else, to her, to Ma, a thought at the desk before the flash and bang and blackness: a longing for home, to go home. For something missing, something deep and sweet and ancient. Hiraeth.

by HALEY CREIGHTON