Roots

The connotation trips up the diction. It makes the words you’re saying hang like nooses from your lips, dripping off like saliva and landing into coiled rope on the floor. You could swallow them back up again; choke down the excuses with a glass of water, skew the truth with a fork and knife. But you seem to have committed to throwing it on the floor at my feet. I wish you’d at least have the courtesy to hand me the mop.

“It was nothing.”and “I didn't mean to make it this much.” I can hear how carefully you've shopped for those words. Picking them up and reading the label, examining the warning for signs that they won’t induce more pain. You’re holding your tongue and I can see it in your face as easily as if you’d put your fingers into your mouth. You want to be blunt, and the words are begging to escape pushing forward kicking back the nice ones you paid for. You’re fighting yourself and losing, and while your armies are drawing weapons and dragging out sentences, I’m building. You haven’t even noticed but I've pushed back the ropes you threw to me, kicked them back across the floor to you. As pleasantries claw their way back down your throat, I’m mixing up the cement and grabbing the bricks.

You haven’t looked up from the vines growing up your legs and planting you to the spot making you stay. Making you want to stay. Your coughing up the bad words into a napkin and tossing them behind you, us. You start to brush your teeth with a long list of mistakes and rinse with an even longer list of apologies. But you can’t look up at me, your eyes are rooted to the vines rooting you to that spot.

But I’ve stopped paying attention to you, and your off your game because the words you’re tossing are barely coming into my view, let alone hitting the mark. I’m on my knees before you, stacking the bricks and spackling on cement. The more shiny new words you purchase, and sharp, brutal words you swallow down or spit to the floor, the quicker I move. By the time you've hit the, “I love you,” aisle I've already reached my chest. Curving the wall to hug close to my frame, circling my narrow, unassuming span.

As you turn down aisle, “Please forgive me,” I've sunk to the floor within my fortress and am dialing nine-one-one. Begging the operator of my mind to make the wall stronger, asking her to send more durable bricks, thicker cement, a mote, and alligators. The drawbridge I’ll do without, because you've bought your words and the money was ours to share. There are only so many funds. You’re wasting your words and now I’ll live without the drawbridge. Exist inside my citadel without a way in, or out.

I don’t know if you ever do look up from your feet. I do know that after a while you cut away at the quick-growing roots that have made it to your thighs. I know that you take a step closer to me, I hear it through the wall. I know you take many steps away and leave a messy trail of shredded bits of labels behind you. And before you close the door to the world we once had, and to me, you say the only words that make it through the woods that have grown in your wake. The only words that cross the moat and swim the waters with placated alligators, and break tiny holes in my many bricks and burst through my ears with stunning clarity. “No one will ever make it through to you. No one will ever get in.”