Why is the Goldfish Floating?

On lost words and the girlhood desk

I’ve begun to drop words.

The filmstrip of my life had already begun to drop memories here and there, which my husband actually appreciates as he is able to recount the same stories with regularity and I am not annoyed. I shrug that I cannot pull up the name of some random road on the Pacific coast we were traveling on a Saturday afternoon whereby we stopped to eat fresh caught fish that had apparently spoiled. Granted, I remember the delirium and vomiting that I suffered, but the tale I tell is one sentence and not a saga full of colorful details like names of roads.

But the words I want and cannot evoke bother me.

Fortyish years ago, I was a prolific poet. The books I read, especially the classics assigned to me in literature classes, fed my hunger for new vocabulary, the kinds of words that rolled around and around in my mind. The agonies I felt in girlhood (the acne, the parents, the boys, the female bullies) pressed me to my notebooks, and I poured out my growing angst and heartbrea…