The Word Collector

She kept, in a blue shoe-box, thousands of small things. Words. Written for her, about her, in spite of her over the few years she had traversed the small world in which she lived.

She collected phrases, thoughts, exclamations, the perfectly punctuated works of nimble fingers, and the slow, lazy, beautiful sloping curves of the artists. The sentiments of friends, lovers, foes and nothings, who over time, had taken on new roles. Lovers had gone from beloved, to hated, to nothing, but their words remained frozen in time. A written pause in a sheet of music that had to be acknowledged and played. With some strange capacity, she memorised things. In a way she never could when it came to textbooks. Each crumpled, ordinary piece of paper took seat in her being, drawing a picture of her life. But it wasn't drawn in straight lines, but letters. Swirls and abysses made of endless, individual letters. Smears where tears had hit the pages, cuts where unfolding and refolding and worn them so thin, they broke.

The world expanded suddenly, and different notes were separated by distance. New memories, new paper, new writing and new thirst. 'A thirst you'd have to drown to ever satiate.' New melodies and new pauses. Jammed chords creating dissonance, snarls across a page, silence. Extended pause, sheets of nothing by new nothings. New colours overtook the old. In a flurry of paper she almost lost it all. Boom boom boom her heart beated. Where were the words? Hidden carefully, but where?

The evidence of her life lay in those sheets of paper. In melodies and 3 or 4 bars that perhaps nobody knew of. She read and extracted melancholy phrases, falling asleep in cold buses to decipher them in her dreams. She walked alone, and then the words were the lyrics in song. But somehow, the greatest beauties lay in the things she found indescribable. In love. In the way her mother held her. In the way her lover held her. In things that were so different and yet.. In the colour of the sky, the rapture of sunset. 'They died punctually, at dusk.' In the evocation of her senses. In the exquisite simplicity of loneliness, and togetherness, deleting all the muddle in between the two.

Once, the words were too much. With shaking hands and a heavy heart she lit fire to the most meaningful note. Knowing, she might regret it later. Years later, a vague sense of the poem etched in her mind, begging to be consolidated. And so she learnt. No matter the reality, words were important. They were more important than fleeting moments of passion. Memories were all you had afterall. Who knew if the same phrasing could ever be conjured up again? And so, she kept the words, like memories, like evidence, that things really happened, and weren't just dreams. Perhaps she was documenting her life, so that when the day came that she no longer remembered anything, they would remain.