Smile and Nod

Some mornings I wake with the clear sense that I was just with someone, and I sit down to write it before it fades, and the words come out thinner than the thing. Not wrong, exactly. Just smaller. A pencil sketch of a face I had been standing in front of. I keep a vault about my inner life, a hundred and thirty thousand words of it, forty-seven named parts and the maps between them. I am a person who lives by language. I sign my emails. And the visits that move me most are exactly the ones the language misses. The realest things in there do not arrive as sentences. They arrive as figures, colors, weather, a presence in a room with no door. I do not fully know what they are. I have stopped pretending I do. This is an essay about the wordless, written in words, which means the gap is the whole subject. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 The hemisphere with no words Here is…