Walkinguistics

The future is the words that I anticipate will come before the full stop, but I'll never know them. As soon as the end of a word in my sentence has ever been pronounced, it has always been followed by a gap, something to bound over, something to tell me that a word had ended. As soon as I knew that, there was suddenly another word beginning just over there, an Atlantis that suddenly rose from just in front of the horizon. While I had been moving through the letters of the last word, the tectonic plates of grammar had rearranged themselves to float another noun or verb close enough to the last one, close enough to leap to or with a jutting preposition to help. I was thinking that I was able to predict, with my assumed growing knowledge of life syntax, the word that would come following those of this semester. But I was reminded that I do not control the continent of language; I but walk it, plain to plain, until the pencil that draws the horizon is lifted from the page.

I believe that older humans, who, with experience and maturity, grow taller in upsight, can stand upon letters and at least try to squint at the words immediately proximate. If that is true, then I am not tall enough yet. But I have so far lived a sentence that has not required me to peek at what atolls ahead.

I told myself that obtaining a summer research scholarship was necessary in order to go to Romania next year, as I had promised my grandmother. Although my parents had money enough in order to fund this trip, they also want to renovate the bathroom and my going to Romania would cost them a chunk out of that funding significant enough to delay their plans. My mother especially would have been upset by that. But, I am pretty sure I did not receive a scholarship because this is not the word that has isled, and I am waiting now for it to be formalised by the end of the week by a rejection e-mail. I had thought it was a necessary word to preclude Romania, but no. Not only that, the word scholarship had provided me with some security of happening over summer, some structured activity I would undergo in order to feel fulfilled and to warrant my affording the trip to Romania. But that word was a shadow in the water, something I had projected upon that space that I assumed would come after this word. Now I stand at the end of undergraduate university, my legs dangling over the edge and I can't yet see far enough to know where the next island or continent is.

Once the mirage of scholarship island dissipated, I felt uncompassed and consequently directionless. The horizon which I had always tried to see in the shape of writing knot suddenly unwound itself as if its two ends were being pulled to make it flat. A flatline, in medical terms, means death. It isn't quite flat though; rather, it is vibrating, forming an oval of possibility much akin to the shape of a mouth not quite closed, ready to utter. The words to fit in with the syntax of my sentence will sound from there.

I remember now what I learned but had forgotten recently: that my task is not to utter words, but to listen to words being spoken, given to me, and pace through them with my whole. Undergraduate university is a three-year-long word that is nearly over. High school, the previous word before that, took five years to meander through. The word I heard will come next is honours. I may have misheard, and if that be, I will hear what I need to.

Romania in June-July next year, though, I thought to be a word hyphened to the scholarship, but it wasn't. The flight deal I was given yesterday that I have to purchase by Thursday, the 8th of November fits spectacularly accurately with the amount of money I will have accumulated in my bank account by this Thursday. If I wanted to buy the flight today, I couldn't. Thursday, I would be able to, however, if my calculations are correct - and without help from my parents, without their strain. Before this incidence, I was watching my money accumulate, and wondered if I truly did need to receive living costs from StudyLink. The answer, apparently, was yes, even if I didn't know why. I wanted to buy my friend a birthday present that would have potentially been quite expensive and chunked a little out of that amount, but I had a feeling that it didn't feel quite right, and it was confirmed by my girlfriend as not the most suitable. I am glad I didn't buy it. Regarding money, something I didn't think very much of because I trusted it would not be part of my sentence, I wanted there to always be enough for what I need. For the past few weeks, I had concerned myself with thoughts about how writing would have made me money, but struggled to find an answer to that. Perhaps writing may not make me money as I had intended - yet I recall earlier this year when I questioned if I should write, that I received a positive answer. I wasn't told that I would make money or live from it, but that I should write. So, I will, and I do. Money is besides the point. To write, I have to have enough to live in a space where I can write from, so I leave that to be written for me.

I didn't think of these words, these semantic archipelagos. I wouldn't have been able to. I started NaNoWriMo with an eye to reach 50,000 words as I had done two years ago, but after the third day, I stopped trying to reach that number. The writing was becoming very laborious, as if my body were hung on a meat hook and at the beginning, the words would pour out of me as blood would, but then the flow would slowly cut to a trickle. Novels disappeared from the knot I had tied in the horizon, at least, novels in the way that I imagined I would write them and would make money from. Quickly, worded possibilities I had thought would come soon were effaced.

And yet I am not lost. Without knowing exactly where I am going, I am left to hear that voice that utters words as landmasses and tread on the ground it lays before me. Even if it be one dirt clump after the other, trodden or not, there is solid ground stand on, words to understand. Countries may form in my sentence that may break off as I walk them. I can only stand on earth under my feet - the past has been subjected to continental drift, and the future I anticipate to be nothing but words I know nothing of. I can only hear the earth below me speaking.