The Blank Dictionary

I collect words and phrases the way some of my friends collect bottle caps—sporadically, slipping them into my pockets when I remember and throwing them out when I don't. Sometimes, the expression itself eludes me, but the meaning remains, a loose definition like a  taste more remembered than actually tasted. English words, French words, Latin and Greek roots, words from books that are not in any dictionary—I hold onto them and use them inside my own head to put things in order, to remind myself why I love the things I love and hate the things I hate.

petrichor – the smell of dust after it rains

sonder – the realization that everyone is living a life as full an unique as your own, and that you appear to them as they to you

hypnagogic – relating to the state of being that is between awake and asleep

I place these words in small corners of my memory, to be called up and used in bits and pieces, when they are just right for something. I love the feeling of a word slotting perfectly into place, describing the intricacies of a situation, like the whorls of a fingerprint pressed lightly in ink and onto paper.

But there is no word I have ever read for you.

There is no word, no poetic turn of phrase, to tell me that another soul in world understands how it feels to be so inexplicably and inextricably linked across miles of distance and months of time. How it is to knot our thoughts together and untangle them over and over, while trying to pretend that we are not pulling pieces of each other away every time we have ever embraced and gone our separate ways. No book I have ever read speaks of soul-mates the way we are, eternally denying the very existence of the bond that pulls us together over pixelated airwaves and unseen thought-tides.

I think of you, and you talk to me, without fail. I never even have to move—you are already there, speaking.

Giving your heart away to someone who has done so much more to deserve it.

And there is nothing I can do to keep you but try and find that word, those letters typeset on a page, hidden somewhere on a shelf that I will never have the pleasure to see. I hope that if I can find the right shapes in black ink that I can unlock this riddle from the inside and tear away the fences and the miles, and pull you to me, like a kite on a string. Like the moon to the sea. Like the way you used to pull me to your chest in the middle of the night.

That word is a phantom, a trick of the light, a whisper half-heard. It will never be found, and one night, mornings and evenings and full moons from now, I will realize that I have spent my days searching for a ghost, and you will be playing that song that blossoms in your lungs to someone else. I will have lost.

I am still searching for that perfect word. I will wrap it up in sheet music and give it to you, to bite between your teeth on your wedding day.

I have already lost.