Frozen Bread

Dear myself.


...The news today said that nobody can understand words anymore. So they used pictures, mostly, and a few sounds, to tell us the weather tomorrow and the day after that.

They showed us a crying person who wore faded clothes and no shoes and sat on a piece of driftwood, somewhere in the sea. And they showed us a man, a woman, and three children surrounded by snow, kneeling over a fire with a piece of bread in their hands. And then they closed the news station.

I asked Dad why they didn't give an explanation, but he just shook his head and said the world had strangled itself. Nobody would understand the explanation because nobody would understand the words.

I tried to picture the world with great blue and green arms wrapping around its own middle and squeezing tight. It didn't make sense.

"Honey, listen to me. Words will be dead by the end of today, so everything they represented will die too. But promise me that you will still live like you always have, even if I'm not there to answer questions and read you stories. Okay?"

"Okay."

Dad told me when I was little that the world would end in a few billion years when our sun exploded, so there was no need to worry.

What had changed?

I asked him why the person on the piece of driftwood was crying, and whether we were close enough to help her. But he just shook his head and sighed.

I remember when everyone stopped talking. Dad brought me to school and nobody was there, so he asked my first grade teacher what was wrong. She couldn't understand what he was saying. We left her sitting with her pretty blue earrings on a stool in front of her classroom.

Later she did something called overdose. Dad wouldn't tell me what overdose was, but he said she did it because she was lonely and now she can't wake up anymore.

"How come we can still talk?"

Dad kissed my forehead and smiled.

It made me remember going skiing with him. We went to a cabin in the mountains where it snowed all day long, and every time he left the room everything was cold. But when he came back he would be carrying firewood and we would dry the logs and put some in the hearth and burn them. He taught me how to light a match. The fire would heat everything up and bits of frost on his eyelashes would melt.

When Dad was there the room would turn warm.

"The man and woman and three children looked like each other, and they were eating together. There was a word for that. What was it again?"

Dad didn't say anything. He just looked at me, and then he walked out of the room.

I don't remember what the word is. Something that started with an "f." Friendly? Fondly?

Family?

I'll look it up in the dictionary later. I'm forgetting a lot of words recently, but it's okay because I have a dictionary and I can read.

I'm going to keep words. I'll write them down, like I am right now. Maybe when I'm older and words are back I can read this again and know I did the right thing.


...I'll keep words alive...