Speaking for Life
“I couldn’t catch the exact word”.
That’s how I’d always tell myself when I say a nearly
perfect word for what I see. It sounds so good the instant I say it, and the
next moment I drown in a sea of doubt. Will I ever utter the right word? That’s
just about everything in life. You live your whole life trying to catch the
exact word that reflects your emotions and draws your feelings in the air or in
the ear of the person listening to you, but you never really feel like you’ve
got it all right and that you’re a master of your own language.
Sometimes when you’re around the people you love, you
suddenly find yourself unable to speak lest you hurt their feelings by saying
one not-so-accurate phrase. You start stuttering like a fool and saying one
word like three times then take it back, say another word, just nearly half of
it, then take it back too and give up completely. It’s funny how at that
precise moment, the person listening to you usually understands what you really
want to say so you start thinking that stuttering is somehow beautiful and then
you addict it as if it’s actually a cure to your talking, while it should be
some kind of suffering to other people. Strange how the things you think are
beautiful can mean the pain of someone else somewhere else in this planet.
You catch your breath for a few moments and sometimes
stare at the things around you giving the impression that you’re trying to be
inspired by a colourful curtain or a vase or a work of art on the wall, that’s
when you realize that in a room full of emptiness, you might not even know how
to speak, because even the decorated walls can get you telling the most
beautiful words ever.
To wrap it all up, it’s not your mind that speaks the
words, it’s also the things around you that speak everything and you’re just a
means of communicating what these inanimate objects want to say. So maybe this
inability to say that ‘exact word’ is only because you’re actually saying the
words inside your surroundings, these things that form who you are, and they’re
a part of you, and you a part of them, so you can also be telling what you
are feeling. You never know. In the end let’s just presume that speaking, at
all, is somehow saying a nearly-exact word.
