Opinionated Type

From my 25 page masters thesis for my senior English class, section ten (slight edits):

I once wrote the following:

“I can still feel the tears running down my face the day my parents told me the news and the day of my grandma’s funeral. It burns, and it leaves me so thirsty. Not necessarily for water, but to fill that gaping hole which I felt had formed in my heart.”

In Like Water by Elizabeth Spires, I was shocked to read the following lines:

You paused,
drawing in a breath. “It’s like a thirst that deepens
as each day passes. Like water,” you finally said. 
“I want him back the way I want a drink of water.” 

It’s a thirst that can never be quenched. 

Of all the pages I have written thus far, this section is by far the most difficult. I have considered taking it out, I have considered re-writing it, and I have considered combining it with another section. 

But this quote I think deserves to stand alone:

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost” (Chesterton). 

It isn’t until it’s lost, however, that we realize that it could be lost. 

It’s not until we’re standing alone, and feeling lonely, that we are able to recall all that had gone wrong, the mistakes we’ve made, or just how much we needed he or she who was lost. It is then, and only then, until we are able to appreciate anything and everything that the person brought into our lives, whether it is a lover, a friend, or even a grandmother. 

And this feeling is the worst in the world. I feel hopeless, even though I know my happiness is in my own control, and I feel increasingly insecure. And what is this I feel? Alone, perhaps? But “alone,” alone is when you’re alone in an empty room, and lonely is when you’re in a crowded room, yet you feel alone. Alone is just an exclamation mark on a blank page, while lonely is an exclamation mark on a page filled with commas. 

I’m that exclamation mark.

But I know as life progresses, I will only get thirstier, and nothing that I try to do will be able to quench this thirst. 

You can’t love until you’ve lost.

-Try authentic Spanish Paella
-Try different meats, such as rabbit or frog
-Eat deep-dish pizza in Chicago and thin crust pizza in New York
-Attempt to try the foul-smelling durian fruit
-Have a cup of civet coffee
-Learn to make beef wellington, and eat it
-Try an authentic dish from as many cultures around the world
-Learn to bake, make ice cream, and cook creatively
-Learn how to dance
-Master (or at least be able to communicate) in Japanese
-And German
-And French
-And Korean
-And Italian
-And Taiwanese (get better at it)
-Speak French in Paris, ish in Madrid, German in Berlin, Korean in Seoul, Italian in Venice,
Japanese in Tokyo, Chinese in Beijing, and Taiwanese in Taipei.
-Skydive
-Ride a horse without freaking out
-Be able to forgive
-Try skiing or snowboarding
-Go to a legit white water rafting, not level one
-Run a marathon
-Self-teach myself coding
-Be published/write a book

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Words typically represent much more than we first face them to be. They don’t have one set meaning, but they represent a feeling, an emotion. Every person has a different feeling or emotion for different words. Words with similar dictionary definitions take on different meanings. Justice and fairness—now there’s a pair that we seem to constantly pair up. Justice is to be fair and to have fairness is to have justice. Those two words, however, represent different emotions and different feelings for, of course, different people.

Both of these feelings (of “justice” and “fairness”), however, have been subjected the nightmare all living languages must bear, which is to throw those feelings in a certain set amount of letters (in languages that use the Latin alphabet, anyway) with a certain spelling, a certain way of pronouncing it, and a certain way to write it down, and we end up with a word.

It’s not really just a word, however.

It’s a box.

Like our choices and judgments, these “words” (feelings and emotions) outgrow their boxes after time. Take “love.” The complexity of this emotion (literally) manifests itself in word form, with some languages having many different ways to express this feeling.

What fairness meant to us as children probably doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for us today—nor do any of the other words. As our morals and beliefs, our choices and judgments, our character and personality grow and expand, as those aspects of our lives tear down the walls of their box and expand to form new walls, these words do as well.

I felt like spending time to understand words themselves is very important, and not just the fact that the meaning may change for us, but especially that different people may believe these words to mean different things. They aren’t defined differently, but they take on a different emotion and a different feeling.