The Kiln and Kin are Cold

Language is not a perfect puzzle piece to fit neatly into the jigsaw of someone else's head, but a cracked pottery fragment held in place by glue and spit, the seal by no means seamless. But it's that very imprecision where air and water leak through that allow for language to be playful, to be fun, to be misunderstood. Through these many imperfect fits, I can create humor, juxtapose the sacred and profane, and create evocative imagery in the minds and hearts of others.

Perhaps I think too much of myself, but I also happen to think the world of words.

Yet for as much as I admire language, it fails me. For me, words evaporate when I try to express feelings or emotions. I feel perhaps more than some and perhaps less than others, but my ability to shape these feelings into words is not always successful.

I suppose this is a long and meandering way to introduce the fact that I've been thinking about my brother a lot. People keep asking me how I'm doing in the wake of his death. They don't say that of course. They just ask how I am and give a meaningful look. More often than not I shrug my shoulders. It's not that I don't want to have the conversation, nor do I want people to stop asking, but I don't have an answer beyond body language most of the time.

There are a lot of things I could say about my brother. I could talk about the person he was. I could talk about the memories I have. I could talk about the way he's frozen in time to me. I could talk about his death. I could talk about the fact that I don't have the faith or belief in an afterlife. I could talk about the finality of things and how cold that is.

I think I've gotten caught up in a contradiction. I know that language is imperfect, that expressing emotions and feelings will never be a precise science, metered out in grams and liters. I know that language is a cracked vessel, but I want my words to be a flawless vase. And rather than fire up the kiln and produce any words, the hearth lies cold.

This is who I am for the most part, words left unsaid, with feelings rarely given form. I know the lesson. I can see the moral, but I open the mouth to speak and find only the coldness of clay.