Delivering all the dead letters

She was suddenly full of words all the time, like there was a pressure on her sternum pushing them bubbling out of her mouth. A happy plague of sentences is what. It lasted for three weeks or so before slowly dying off as she came to realize that the things she talked about didn’t have any weight, which they didn’t, but they did.

But those three weeks. At first it was a kind of miracle, the way we suddenly found ourselves awash in things to talk about after months of dry land. She told childhood stories, ones I’d never heard, like the one about the inflatable pool or the one about her dog eating a whole turkey and throwing up in her bed or the one about her uncle hanging her over the banister by her ankles and talking like he was Hans Gruber, which these were warm and film-grained memories that filled in the darkened places. She told about her dreams and her fears and how some of them were the same thing. She told little things, white truths, honey-thick and without fear of judgment or the pain of human loneliness.

You would think that after all those silent clinking dinners that I would have fallen in love all over again, that what would have happened would have been a soft slipping away of all the barbs and resentment. But come on. By week two I was on the couch watching TV asking her to wait for the commercial, but wait, have you seen this commercial? I was staying late at work, which I didn’t even have the excuse that it was my career. Week three saw the birth of mocking uh-huhs and rolled eyes. It’s funny the way we commit these tiny assassinations again and again. Actually I guess it’s not funny. But it happened.