Real Words

by Carla Agoras

Everyone knows how it feels to lack the words to express the joy or the sorrow or the love.

Where are the words?

There are no words.

There is no word that wouldn’t trivialise the beauty, and the sorrow, and the stillness, and the hope. So you retreat in silence, this grandiose mistress of everything that cannot be expressed.

Where are the words?

I have no words.

So we sit in silence and the silence sits in us.

Maybe we’ll talk later about it, but the language will fail us. And the impossibility of articulation will be the ultimate validation of realness.

It was real because I can’t express it, I’ll say to my children.

Don’t worry, sweetheart. The other children don’t have to understand.
But mom, what happens when there are too many words? When there’s a cluster of unfinished words bursting their way into a sentence that will never make sense?

Because you intuit the words, doesn’t mean you know the words.
How could one even make up their mind?

Bow, break down, buckle, capitulate, cave in, cease, give in, give away, go down, pass away, perish, quit, wilt, yield.
Collapse?

Maybe… I’m not a native speaker, you see… never was, never will be.
Is it still real if you have all the words but you just can’t decide?
I’m afraid not.