I have the Moon, You have the Sun

He has never been good with words. At least, not the nice ones. That's not to say he doesn't know any nice words, it's just he's at a loss when trying to take nice  nouns, adjectives, verbs, and forming them into a coherent sentence. It's always been easier to be blunt, sarcastic, and often downright rude, and though his words may grate like handfuls of sand beneath your clothes, he stopped worrying about how those words bothered others along time ago.

That is until those words failed him, too.

It's not that he doesn't have anything to say, now. It's more like he doesn't know how to say it.

He blames it all on the sun, or more like the sun personified. At first, the old words came easily enough. A snarky comment here, an insult there. However, given time even moonlight has to give way to the sun and he found his old words flowing less and less easily. He tried to keep them going, tried to feed them with the depths of his vocabulary skills for as long as possible, refusing to give in, but too much time in the sun can make even the deepest wells dry up.

Instead, that old well of words became a spring of new, sweeter words but before they could flow unheeding, he stopped them up behind the most powerful dam he could build, fear. A year and a half later and those new words have pooled until they have become a vast sea, exerting so much pressure on his carefully constructed facade, threatening to break it with the slightest provocation. He could no longer ignore the warnings.

He has tried. Early on he didn't understand them so it was easy to forget them. Then he tried to intellectualize them into obscurity. Later he cursed them before finally just flat out ignoring them. But you can only ignore the glaring danger signals for so long, and so, he finally came to accept them. And it sucked. Not the most eloquent description but still the most adequate. However, acceptance hasn't taken him out of the danger zone. He still needs to use them, to empty the sea of words before the dam collapses on him.

Yet, still, he doesn't know how to say them. Plus, as loathe as he is to admit it, he's frightened. That's probably what has him so tongue tied. Fear. Why is he afraid? Because to use these words aloud means he has hope and one thing he learned a long time ago is that hope is a lie.

Hope is a nice word, and he's forgotten how to use nice words.

But the sun is where everything grows and flourishes, and if you look hard enough you can always find an oasis in the dessert.

For now, though, he's still trying to search for the right words.

Then he has an idea. If he can't use his own, perhaps he can use someone else's. It's basically the same thing, right? As long as the intention behind the words is the same?

So, one day, he stops at the little shop in town that sells various gifts including stationary. After searching for an hour he finally settles on a box of 4x6 cream colored paper with envelopes the color of the sun on a late summer afternoon, a deep rust orange. It was perfect.

At home he sets his purchase down at his desk and walks away. He knows what he plans to do but he has to work up to it, so he busies himself with minor chores, dinner, homework, and finally a shower. When everything that can be done is done, he sits at his desk, his laptop open and playing random music from his extensive collection of downloaded songs. Music is his passion. Well, one of three ( the other two being more recent developments) but definitely his oldest. His library is eclectic as they come ranging from traditional Japanese to British rock and pop from the 60s and 70s to more modern J-Pop and Western Indie rock. It's all there. It's what has comforted him through some of the most turbulent times in his life and he's always looking to expand his collection.