The search for words....

Have you ever gone so long without writing that you suddenly find you have nothing to say? That's the way I've been feeling lately. It's almost as if the ability to write, if not used every day, becomes a clogged bit of machinery -simply to tired and rusty to continue. So today, I make a point to search for the words and find something to say. Without the ability to write, I fear I would also lose myself entirely.

My sister in law told me a story recently that I guess best encapsulates this fear from me. Her mother in law is living with them now. She is elderly and sadly suffering from a very bad case of Alzheimers. I am told that her symptoms are always bad but she seems to get more disorientated at night. At any rate the idea of forgetting my loved ones was my greatest fear until I heard of something worse. Kay, the woman I am speaking of, has Alzheimers so bad that she is even forgetting the meaning of words. It isn't bad enough that she doesn't realize that my brother in law is her son, she no longer understands what the word son means.

I can't imagine living in a world without words. I can't fathom having to search through the void to find their meaning. All my life the words have been my friend. They have been there to comfort me when no one else could. I write to express myself and clean the cobwebs out so to speak. If I ever lost that ability, my life would truly be over.

In those moments that I want to tell people how I really feel - especially when the emotion is difficult or intense - my tongue gets thick and my words won't come. I have no other option but to write them down. My fingers don't have an issue getting the words out when my tongue refuses to work. My fingers fly across the keyboard getting all those powerful emotions out. But if they had to struggle to remember the meaning of the words... that for me is the equivalent of Dante's worst level of hell - frozen, impotent and forgotten.