what's in a word but...

the essay that won me an award

What is in a word but thorns?

Sometimes, in the sleep-stained aftermath of dawn, I imagine myself waking up smaller than the world, smaller than myself, and smaller than the body I inhabit. I try to wriggle my mortal arms, pin them to the cavernous walls of flesh and blood, traipse through my capillaries, swim in the river of my marrow, and nestle into the pouch of my mouth. There, rests my tongue — and what do I speak then? That life is bigger than our minuscule glitter? Bigger than our speck of mortality and particle of breath? That words in themselves are just made of these atomic molecules vibrating in air? Procured from the bones of sounds?

It’s like calling a wave just a tide, a scream just a whisper, and my mother’s hollowed scream after a battered door just grief.

What’s in a word, then, that has gripped poets’ voice into calling it an ocean-blue sadness? An empty knock that screams? What’s in a word that smells like the fester of an old wound buried underneath layers of scabs?

I believe, then, that words are not just words.

There’s a brilliant skill that people learn when they begin to see the soul of a word. It’s called wordsmithing.

Such a term carries the implication of defiant bravado, a flexed muscle, a brawny resolution — but underneath its strong shell is not merely the ability to combat, outself a warrior, and malleably bend the steel of words to sharpness.

It’s pulling your skin with your own teeth, fangs, and decayed molars until the world feels like it hurts enough, like poetic justice molten into skin.

It’s about poking holes through the ceiling and ripping down stars from its obsidian darkness to find the rightness of it, the right clove, the right shape.

When the word feels like it is existential enough, nihilistic, bare, broken, fragmented, and undulating;the word doesn’t stop beating its heart there.

It continues to live in us. In me. In you.

It’s in the way we poeticize our hunger and angers against the bones of our brusque father.

It’s in the way we sew bandages on the wounds of tenderness we sought from our mothers.

It’s in the way we radicalize our hurt into rebellion and defiance.

It’s in the way we democratize our shackled voices into freedom.

It’s in the way we shift our ostracization into rebelling, fighting, and boldening communities that have experienced identical splinters as us.

It’s in the way we fight against the rust, pressing our bodies into the barbed wire until we bleed the revolution of our angst.

It’s in the way we see ourselves in the mirror and recognize something abstract, wrong, different — and glittery.

Words capture that liminal space of anonymity and glitter.

When we use words, we define ourselves, our morality, our choices, and our fate.

What is in a word, then, but our ghosts?

Our mishaps? Our clandestines? Our serendipities?

And our multiple selves buried underneath the old ones until they are sedimented enough to become crystals of the future?

What’s in a word, then, but to wield it rightfully, not righteously?

What’s in a word but to defeat what our fists can’t flatten?

What’s in a word but us?

Our power.

Our identity.

And our paving stars.