Sense of Speech

It’s hard for me to explain what I was feeling at the house party. My thoughts and senses became one. Everything seemed merged in pairs. The music became one with the light and together they hazed the room in red. The cigarette smoke entangled itself with the scent of lipstick warmed from the pull of her mouth. Someone’s dark hair became the shadow of the Bougainvillea he sat behind. A freshly laundered shirt was tinted with after-dinner coffee and burnt steak.
I was in another one of my states and I was having difficulty getting words out and in. So I mostly kept the wine glass to my lips and pretended my mouth was too full to talk, pretended to hear the words that bounced off me like hail on a windshield.

My ability to speak was definitely impaired but my sense of speech was not. I could feel words without actually hearing them. I looked around the room. A woman lost in possibility, put her long fingers to her lips. A man’s face paused in fear before bursting into laughter. The hairs all over your body are there to hear those moments. Of this I am certain.

Nothing would go unnoticed by me tonight.

There was something soft in her voice and excited in her blood. It was like this, I heard the words through the movements of her body and expressions of her eyes. They ended a sentence by glancing to the side and underlined words by shooting a direct look into my pupils. I was deaf to everything but that. Her place of work was something that lit up her face and engorged a vein near her temple. Talk of family squared her shoulders and opened her chest so I noticed the opal that hung on her neck. The topic of her last love showed me the place where her hair, like a dark ocean ended and the shore of her neck began. I wanted to become stranded there.
Just so you know, I didn’t hear myself either. My words were merely notes to bring her closer and thus know her better. I noticed how a certain subject would make her breasts rise towards me, another would make her eyes glisten; another would make her hands finger the sugar packets on the dinner table. A breath became deeper and in this way, something new would be learned. I wondered what else I could discover when I got close enough to touch her.