The Linguist

                I used to believe I was a very emotional person but that’s not true. I don’t feel anything. Instead of feeling, I think. Thinking can look like feeling. To the untrained eye it can be incredibly hard to discern. Everyone says that thinking is logical and emotions are messy but really thoughts go in a million directions at once and emotions go in straight lines.

                I looked inside myself for the first time tonight. Really looked. More than just a cursory glance, like someone standing guard at an impenetrable fortress. All my organs are wrapped in words, shellacked together into a hard shell. The thoughts are criss-crossed over each other so dark that they look like blood but they shine like armor. It’s thickest around my heart, but words also pump through my bloodstream, twine around nerve-endings, and flow into every chink and crevice.

The casings are perfectly formed to the organs inside, but thick, hard, and gleaming. Like an old steel car without airbags or seatbelts, the shells of thought only really protect themselves. A crash would leave no dent, not a scratch. Even if the precious cargo shatters, liquefies, or slowly disintegrates into dust, the outside will shine like an empty skyscraper.

Word might get out, eventually, that something had gone wrong inside, but anything rising from within must pass through layers and layers of words, telling it how to act and react, what is reasonable, what is right, what is wrong, tiers of analysis and proscription before it can even make it to the surface. By the time it works its way through the densely packed expectations, caveats, and explanations, the message is unrecognizable. It may still be a mayday, but the precise nature of the problem is always masked and muted. I treat it like raw emotion, once it’s been seasoned, cooked, and garnished.

                My own voice gets muffled by the din. The air in my lungs bounces among a thousand pillowy thoughts before it can escape my lips; thoughts that quiet, that temper, other peoples’ thoughts, thoughts that I attribute to others who surely never thought them, lies, truths, song lyrics. What I say is never exactly what I mean.

                “You are thinking something,” he said. “I can tell. Just open your mouth and say what is in your mind.”

                It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I physically could not. The words were clear and coherent in my mind but the passageways from my brain to my throat are so choked with words and thoughts that the ones I’m thinking come out muddled with their edges blunted.

                It’s even worse when I’m alone. The words inside me can pile on top of me and weigh me down, can surge beneath me and lift me up, but they are slippery, fickle, and hollow. Sometimes in the morning they stick to my eyelashes and glue my eyes shut. Sometimes they settle in the switchbacks of my ear canals and twist incoming thoughts as others speak them.

                Many are my own, but I collect them. From friends, from strangers, from books, songs, Facebook statuses, advertisements. Every word I’ve ever heard or read has filled a crack somewhere. Some are locked away in the order they came in. Particularly cherished compliments will often stay for years but if not treated carefully will begin to curl at the edges and sag in the middle. Criticisms and wrong words spoken will lodge themselves somewhere inconvenient. They are diamond-plated and will never erode, still slicing deftly when new thoughts, minding their own business, try to edge gingerly past them.

                I think if I could find a way to syphon the words away slowly I would be able to stop drowning in them, but when I open my mouth a few catch in the too-small holes of the drain and block the others. They form a cyclone, come out spiraled with doubt, and once they start they cannot stop, more words issuing forth, explaining and qualifying, grasping for the control that was lost when they passed my teeth. The sea of words rises, flooding back into my ears and filling the ocean once again.

                The trouble is I keep trying to explain away my words. I keep trying to think my way out of my thoughts. To escape I need to feel: really, truly, completely, without analysis. I imagine my organs swelling and bursting out like Bruce Banner shredding his clothes as he becomes The Hulk, but they are atrophied, broken, shrunken within their shells and I frankly don’t think they have it in them. I feel like a spider trapped in its own web. I tried to build a fortress but it became a prison.