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Dear Stutter [“Certain words are still warm with your touch”]
Certain words are still warm with your touch: stutter, for instance. It always gives me trouble. Perhaps it’s because saying it reminds me of you, as though I’m calling for you. & then there’s my name. It seems like bad luck to stutter on your own name, but I don’t think it’s an accident. As a child, I was always nervous when I had to introduce myself. Other words, the way a pillow preserves the indentation of a head, also hold your impression: Cleveland (my hometown), Chadbourne (the street I grew up on), Oberlin (my college). It’s as though they belong more to you than me, which seems cruel because they constitute my home. If we ever part, you’re getting Ohio. Other words, though, you couldn’t care less about. I would be happy to give you squeegee. I’ll trade you Cleveland for festooned. Considering that I’m a writer, giving up festooned is a real sacrifice. Plus, it’s great around the holidays. I’ll even throw in hullaballoo. & why do you like L-words so much? Lunch, lion, limelight. You stretch them out like a kid with silly putty. It’s as though L-words are my Achilles heel. Once at a writing conference, when I was younger & thinner, I walked off the stage to a round of applause, & later that evening another writer told me he would be jealous if it wasn’t for my stutter. He reached for the first thing he could grasp to take me down, but the part of the story that really stings is that at the time I believed him. You are the ache I can’t dislodge & won’t confess, not even to myself. Achilles, though, chose a short, momentous life over a long & peaceful one. Where would I be without you? We spent so much time alone together, skipping stones across the river or staring at the telephone. I have a better sense now of what it means to crouch behind trees, to walk between briars, or to break full throttle into the water through a pane of ice. Some nights I take the garbage to the curb, & the moon is as thin as a water stain in the sky. In the morning, as I drive to work, mist hangs between the trees like cobwebs. In class, one student blushes every time I call on her. When she speaks, she looks down at the ground, as though it were a destination. Don’t deny it. I know you see it too.