My Love Affair with Words

You see I have this love affair with words.

There’s just something about the way you say them or use them or don’t. 

I remember when I was a child; how I used to just sit and read the dictionary, looking for words I didn’t know.  How I would practice them, rehearsing them over and over and over again, enunciating each syllable, loving how easily they would slip and slide and sometimes jam off my tongue. 

With words like omniligent or superfluous, vacuous or soliloquy, jejune or loquacious, feckless or facetious, epiphany or evanescent, diffident or deciduous - Can’t you just hear it?

And not just the ones that seemed difficult words, but the easy ones too, or so I thought, like love and hate, mine and yours, his and hers, why and why not, when and how long – You know those words.

And then there are those words from long ago that just make me want to stand up and shout. Words like straightway and lo, verily, behold and surely, nevertheless and forever, Yes – how I love them.

And it started quite a while ago, So long ago in fact that you really have to start at the beginning for. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And it was that Word that became my Word and my God and it all came together when I started reading his Word that I saw the importance of words and the power of the word to be able to speak the word and motivate with the word and elevate with the word consecrate, dedicate, even create with the word - but I found that I could also exacerbate with the word, and I could also annihilate with the word, and desecrate with the word and even emasculate with the word, that I had to begin to use words very carefully for I found that there’s life in the word.

But this knowledge only made my love grow deeper, for how can one word become so many words, like a noun word, a verb word, then an exclamatory word or a commanding word, like Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, the First and the Last, my All in All– yeah, Oh how I love the Word.

…Tell me have you ever lain in bed at night and the Word would just come and caress your mind and that with every nuance, and every insight and every phrase, and turn of a phrase, where only a certain word would do, uhmmm yeah – that’s how it is for me – how sometimes in that very special part of night, when only a few souls are lingering about,  just before the day breaks, that a word would just ease into that semiconscious state of mind and it would take root, then take form and then there it would be (pause), a title for my next play, a new book to be written, and new poem to be spoken, Oh yeah – I can love his word forever, then I am finally able to drift back off, saturated, totally consumed, wallowing in this awesome word. 

And later, just a little while later, when I wake up, I lean over the side of the bed, still groggy, remembering, totally spent from the word.  So I ask you – got a light?