Words

I grew up in a family of readers and writers, thinkers, dreamers and part-time philosophical chroniclers. We were all veritable word collectors faced with the spectre of lives lived largely, while simultaneously challenged to describe it with any sense of psychedelic clarity.

We all haunted flea markets and second-hand bookshops crammed with mysterious, dusty volumes.
Mismatched bookshelves leaned against one another heavily, weighed down like Atlas, groaning and creaking with the weight of books in various states of disrepair. We stepped into them stealthily, with the air of explorers or treasure hunters.

Other customers felt similarly mercenary too, because as we inched closer, they would huddle up territorially to the books they were closest to. The books themselves invited us to wiggle them out from their tightly packed resting places. They wanted to be opened, examined, read, experienced.

Cardboard boxes were shoved under tables stacked with still more books. Those half-concealed boxes were slightly illicit, since they had not been unpacked yet, but they might hold 'the one', the book of all books, it could be anything, it changed minute to minute. It was the book we picked up and instantly felt the warmth in our hands, the sentences transcending themselves as they showed the story, the words, mere symbols for the perfomance in an ampitheatre, that was being played out between the lines of the book. Those books were hugged to our chests, paid for and they never left our hands until completion.

Inside them, we found the treasures we sought, works of great gravity, non-fiction tomes on any conceivable subject, classics, pulp books with absolutely no literary value and stolid happy-endings, lurid bodice-ripping softcovers to be chewed through like junk food, sobering academic studies on hypnosis or war crimes, poetry and prose, all were found and purchased. Tolkein, Frankl, Hemingway, James Herriot, Agatha Christie, Erich Segal, Mark Twain, Poe, to name but a few, would all find out way into our reused, crumpled plastic shopping bags to be brought home, examined, pored over, read, studied, examined, consumed, even....

Like cats with a serious hairball problem, the words would thread their way into us, as we consumed vast shelves of books, tracts on every conceivable topic, we would then reformulate what we had assimilated, and suddenly regurgitate what we had picked up, oftentimes less then delicately.
We used to collect words from books, from each other, from strangers, and try them out, taste them on our tongue and used them experimentally, like a sip or scent of foreign beer. We then gauged effectiveness with a critical eye. Some wordage was discarded immediately, some were implemented into routine daily vocabulary.
Other words were sticky, stubborn. They were picked up like a bad case of poison ivy, spreading across our general conversations, overused, tainting our every communication, then cleared up after a time, with relief.

Other words were so unusual, so eclectic, so rarely appropriate, they grew indistinct and forgotten, only to be plucked out again out of memories darkest ochre recesses without forethought, shaped on lips, formed with tongue, brought to life on the flow of voice, like an ancient butterfly.

We, as a family truly believed in free speech. In South-African's apartheid era, that was slightly risky. We felt compelled to discuss everything at our dinner table. No matter how red our guests ears got, we conversed easily and freely. The only speech that was not truly perfectly free, was the illustrious set of expletives, garnered from Grandpa's driving vocabulary, and its effect on the 'establishment. Saying those cost a lecture in the very least.

Having a family who used words like weapons, like tools, like spices on exotic cuisine was wonderful.
My Mom actually published novels, my father published a bit of poetry and some psychiatric articles. I have no doubt my sister will publish as soon as she truly believes it herself, and I... am writing because I need to.
Like the hairball, the words tend to clump together, then threaten to overflow and spill. I hope to publish one day, share one of the many projects which draw words from me, but the writing itself will decide.

Discovering a new writer who seems to speak to my soul, is a heady occasion. A writer, with the right kind of penship, drawn from inside their own heart. They draw it out, like macabre tattoo artists, using their own blood ink, to bleed images directly into my spirit. Their words run totally through me, permeate in layers to reach me, teach me. Those vivid lines recalled from my favorite books, have burnt through so deeply, they scar me by their very starkness. Then there are my favourite writers, whose words melt directly into my skin, they feel so right, so purely written, so comfortable to me, they slide right through my flesh and blood and sink into my bones gently.They might be sad, intense, hurt, loving, beautiful, exquisitely simple, but they just have substance and soul.

As for others in this world who deal in the currency of words, I endlessly gravitate towards them, exchanging knowing kinship, just because we understand the same language.
I have never stopped loving bookstores. They have the feel of a sparkling dragon's cavern to me, the ambience of a soft treasure trove, brimming with the scent of blood-ink and sentient words on pages, freshly printed.
In bookstores, I have found all I am looking for.