When You Tell Me You Aren't Good With Words
by Megan Pillow
For D
I tell you I have the words for the first moment I saw you. You were pushing that stalled car out of the middle of a busy road. You hadn’t said anything yet, but you held your finger up to me and smiled, as if to say just wait, as if to say almost there. I didn’t need to hear you speak to understand.
I tell you how the first words you said to me seconds later were one minute, and I think I would have waited for you to cross that road to me for an hour, or a day, or a year.
I tell you words are overrated.
I tell you I know about the cries of your daughter and the anger of your aunts and the fears of your nieces and nephews and the pain of your stepdaughter and I know you are at the center of them, listening, and you don’t need words for that.
I tell you there’s this way you put your arm around me and pull me close to you that feels like the rush of your breath against my neck, this way that you lace your fingers through mine that feels like the click of your tongue.
I tell you that the sound of your lips parting before you speak to me is like the sound of a window opening up inside me somewhere. It fills me with light.
I tell you I don’t need the sound because I already know what you’re going to say.
I tell you I have enough words for the both of us.
I tell you that still, you take my hand and say you’ve talked too much. You tell me you want to hear my stories.
I tell you dozens.
I tell them to you from the depths of my bed, from the depths of the dark. I imagine you across town in your own bed, in your own dark. You tell me you love the sound of my voice.
I tell you the way you kiss me is word after word after word, the way you take my nipple in your mouth is a sentence that leaves me breathless, the way you grasp my neck and slide inside is a language, a language, and you are teaching me again and again, and the thrust of every lesson populates a new vocabulary inside me.
I tell you that other people have tried to teach me how to speak that way and none of them have taught me more than a letter.
I tell you that I knew the word for this before I even started writing it.
I tell you that I wrote the ending first because you gave me the words to do it.
I tell you that I had this dream last night that I went to a country I visited long ago because I heard the country calling me.
I miss you, it said. Come back.
And so I flew there, and when I arrived, the streets were empty. But then there was a person walking toward me, and there were people, a dozen, a hundred of them, a legion of quiet that flooded the streets at the sound of me. They came from their houses, from the edges of the trees, from the ring of road and the center of the water that surrounded them. One by one, they opened their arms to me. One by one, I went to them. They said nothing, but they held me, and I felt safe again. And then, while one of them held me close, another person put their arms around him. And then someone put her arms around them, and another, and another, until every single person held me in a layered embrace, and the trees around me burst into flower, and the gray sky washed itself to blue before me, and the air caught in my throat like the way your fingers catch up a thing that you think you’d lost long ago, and deep in the center of that country of people, I felt this unmistakable echo, not the sound of the words, but the knowledge of them:
Welcome home
And when I woke up, I realized that country was you.
Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. She is co-editor of The Audacity, a new newsletter by Roxane Gay, and founder of Submerged: An Archive of Caregivers Underwater. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, in Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Guernica, The Believer, TriQuarterly, and Gay Magazine and has been featured in Longreads. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her two children.
