She spoke her first word as she slid out of her mother's bloody frantic womb. "What", she said. And that is all she said for the first month of her life. Come month 2 and she started to speak, first in low rumbles, then in high pitched shrieks. She unleashed a torrent of words that came out jumbled and bumping into one another, excited and exciting, frightening and exhilarating, fascinating and sorrowful. She spoke in her sleep, she mumbled in her waking, she screamed in her fright and she whispered promises and honeyed words to the people she loved. And she spoke some more...
She grew up, she got her first period in the midst of her frenetic jabbering, she yelled in surprise at the warm stickiness and the gush of blood between her legs, but her vocabulary never stumbled. She talked through college, punished everyday for incessant chatter. She fell in love and was shunned repeatedly and she fell in love again. She learnt to tone down her constant speech to a whisper, a whisper that rose to a chant suddenly unbeknownst to her, a chant that she hurriedly suppressed to a whisper. She loved again and she married a gorgeous man with the moon in his eyes when he looked at her and craters in his cheek when he spoke of her.
The night of her ethereal wedding her words turned into a monotone, speech slurred and stumbled, her breath caught and didn't uncatch again. She spoke and she spoke with the light of terrible debilitating fear in her eyes, she spoke with a gasping tremulous voice, she spoke and dug her fingernails into her brand new sparkling husband-with-craters-in-his-cheeks' arms. And as she spoke, a serene blue crept up from the mysterious earth into her toes and crawled upward, stroking and soothing her heaving body. And she spoke and she cried and she tried to battle the desirous, beautiful, beckoning blue...
The blue took over... and she finally heard silence.
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