English: A Love Affair

I love language, and because English is the lover I grew up with, I love her best.  She’s subtle and sensible in slingback Louboutins and knee-torn Levis.  She can dance all night, gliding like a princess or grinding the stage burlesque or rustling between the trees like a black wind witch, flowing on the moonless breeze.  But she is a witch — with conjures that — in magic — change her words to whatever she wants them to mean.  Yet she prefers straight talk — prepositions and modifiers that let you know exactly what and where and when, even if it isn’t now.

And my lover is a thief who steals without remorse.  A freebooting pirate who takes the words she needs — and more — just because she can, gloried by the theft.

She’s a glutton who dines at her sister’s banquets, selecting the most delicate morsels to claim as her own and never tiring of the feast.

But my lover works hard.  She is a mechanical engineer who fits strange words together with invisible nanoweld precision, producing new tools that exactly fit their employment.

And she is an inventor.  Seduced by necessity, she is lewd and wanton, abandoning herself to satisfy his needs.

She is beautiful as the slip mists of fog, sleeping, gauze angel white in the forest dawn; angry as cracked open thunder; sad as a lost puppy’s tears and quiet as a bead of night.

Painful, bold and strong, she hunts with the predators, howling with the chase, quivering with the kill.

And she is a flirt, tempting me, flaming my desire to touch and hold and caress the words she speaks to me.

But mostly, my lover loves me.  She laughs and sings and listens.  She speaks only truth (and the occasional lie.)  She stays with me even when foul with blank page fury, I have no words for her.  And there, at the edge of the wilderness, lost and alone, it is she who comes and finds me, takes my hand and whispers, “Let’s go home.”