THE NAMING OF THINGS
Jaime Morelli
These are the words I use to describe myself: flummoxed, saturnine, peripatetic, staid.
The first words I saw when I opened the dictionary were painting and palimpsest, but they are nouns, and by definition, non-descriptive. I had to look further for my adjectives, the various nomenclature of rejection and grief. They couldn’t be simple or short words. There is gravity in multiple syllables.
If I can lose myself in this maybe I can forget.
These are the words I can’t forget:
“I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“I can’t be with you right now.”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
His words are not ostentatious, but they ricochet around my head in trajectories that interweave with the everyday: “do the laundry,” “buy groceries,” and “take a shower.” I will try to think, “I need to drop this skirt off at the dry cleaners,” but it will come out, “I need to think we’re not going to make it and drop this skirt off at the dry cleaners.”
But there’s more to this than just words.
I found her things in his laundry basket. He left them on the top of the pile, where anyone could see them. He used small words then, too.
We used small words, together: “there,” “yes,” “oh.” Everything small seemed so much larger then. I am working on making those small things small again.
I am running out of words.
I thought about moving on to the things he didn’t say, but the shoebox is already full of little slips of paper and I cannot spare another. Not writing it down makes the memories difficult to differentiate from the things I wanted to be. I have to open the shoebox almost daily just to remember what happened. Somewhere in those words is something that I missed.