One day you drop it.
On a drive home from school, during conversation with your young daughter on a blustery early-winter day, you unexpectedly lose compromise.
While sitting at a stop light, it slips out of your fingers like an earring back — it hits the floor and bounces somewhere unknowable. In the space of your loss, the only sound is the rhythmic tick of a blinker pointing left. Even the wind is so surprised it stops.
Confused and grasping for those 10 letters in the cold air, you can only reach companion and comparison. But those don’t fit in the space carved for compromise. Your daughter did not comparison recess. She didn’t companion to preserve peace among playmates. Those words taste watery and slightly off, like nothing you’d want to keep in your mouth. They’re unsuitable, talentless stand-ins.
You stay calm, take a deep breath, and try again — you’ve got plenty of other earring backs in your figurative thesaurus. Looped ones as delicate as silk bows, and flat sturdy plastic ones. Trade and yield and accommodation or deal.
You will accommodate a different word. You will trade.
The next evening you’re talking about your day while unloading the dishwasher, and you drop crouton. Searching among the dripping dishes, you can only find croissant and coupon. But what can you do with those? They are erroneous and senseless. They will ruin your dinner salad with mushy bread and newsprint.
What you need is the right words. Ones that will fill and sustain you.
As days come, more words begin to leave you. Like pearls fleeing a broken necklace string, they roll away in all directions — threatening slips and hard landings, the bashed knees and broken wrists of misunderstanding.
You seek boggle but can only find bumble, which would boggle your mind if only you could think of it. A vicious winter storm turns viscous and makes landfall in your guts, thick and heavy, right where your confidence used to lie. You search the closet for estranged yet you can only see ostracized, but that’s not right at all except in cases where it is. Cases like these, where the sentences you once called friends are shutting you out, excluding you from their sweet company.
Weeks later, you’re trying to write about being coerced to create despite becoming speechless, but those letters slide out of your hands as though they were smooth and slippery-wet. You conjure up cavort and coalesce, but God knows what damage they would do to your story. You refuse to cavort with the wrong words that remain. Your thoughts will not coalesce.
What will you do if language leaves you? If you can no longer say the things you mean, and can only access slanted shadows of the words you need?
That’s not possible you try to spit, but after a bewildered pause only popular comes out and dribbles on the floor. You’re frantically searching for synonyms but you can’t find synonym, only metaphor and simile.
Your thesaurus shrinks in the cold wind, folding in on itself. It’s pulling up stakes and moving out of town.
You feel frustrated, bereft, fading, untethered like a let-go balloon in the big, wide sky. You might feel more, if you could think of the words.
Months pass. One snowy afternoon while driving alone, you glance down and find compromise lying on the floor between the seat and center console of your car.
You look at it for a long time, studying the arches of its o’s and valleys within the m’s, before silently tucking it into your coat pocket for safekeeping.