Sublingual (word seeking)

He was a poet. Words were very important to him. Finding the right word could be a bit of an obsession. A valid and noble obsession, but perhaps his OCD or his PTSD or his loneliness made his seeking more intense, more robust, more impassioned than most people.

He was searching.
*** searching ***
*** searching ***
*** sea…

Speechless!

Nope, not quite the right tone.

*** searching ***
*** searching ***

His life had become frozen in a ice forest of his own making. His certainty about words did not extend into his certainty about life. In fact, he was quite lost. The Christmas holidays brought neither joy nor celebration. He stayed home. Brooded. Wrote some things. Ate alone. He didn’t even have a cat.

*** searching ***
*** searc…

Sublingual. Bingo. Sublingual-bingo.

It was a hit. His mind relaxed a bit as he typed the word into an outdated note app on his battered iPhone. Sometimes, he used Siri to write poetry. He even had her read it back, in an Australian voice while watching a live video feed from a beach in Hawaii. He would turn the volume up on the old iMac and kill all the lights in the room. Hypnotized by the choppy voice of his “down under” sweetheart, who knew all of his best lines.

Just under his tongue, he could sense the desire to speak again. He’d been silent for a week. Writing, and letting she-Siri recite his words back to him. His friend, another poet, interrupted her lilt for a moment as a phone call tried to get through the tropical miasma. He rejected the call and restarted Siri’s performance of his latest word jam salad.

Read more Short-Short Stories from John.