The Belonging Words

Getting around, on my first day in the city, was like diving in a pool of letters where I was trying to connect words in order to make sentences to keep myself afloat. Every well-constructed word was an achievement, and every new learned one was a revelation. I found myself drowning in the English culture without tools to climb the tall language barrier. I had to start from scratch and the journey towards the top was going to be a hard one.
I was on the tube towards central London trying to read and understand the advertisements on the carriage; always looking for a chance to improve my English. In one of the stops, a couple crashed in managing to find a bit of space next to me. The man’s back was within a few inches from my chin while the woman stood facing him. Over the top of his shoulder I could see her face, which looked tired and sore, with runny make up. She looked at the man in the face and, with distress in her voice, said something. I paid attention to their conversation trying to catch a word or a phrase, but all I got was a headache. His answer sounded furious in the shape of, what it looked to me, a very long sentence. She crumbled. He continued speaking but the words seemed to turn into ice on her skin.
I didn’t need to speak the language to understand what was happening. I thought how meaningless words were in moments like that. The language of emotions was universal. The spoken language was the need of human being to name concepts that couldn’t be seen or shown. Every word was a name. The languages were different in how we named those meanings that were the same everywhere, and for everyone.
Since I landed that morning, I concentrated all my attention on the hopes and high expectations I had for my new life, trying not to let my fears and the longing for what I left behind, come to the surface. I had never been alone until then. The image of me on a train, inside of a tunnel network, which was the root system of the vast city of London standing above, with no one to hold on to, made my bones come to dust. I didn’t know anybody in the city, and there was no way I was going to call home to tell them about my unfortunate beginnings in London. I was afraid of not finding my place here; after all I worked to make it possible. I wanted to scream “stay close, don’t go” to my own past which, in that moment, seemed to be everything I had. I felt nauseous and I couldn’t breathe. Coven Garden, said the signs on the next stop. This wasn’t my stop, but I had to get off. I walked up the first stairs that I came across and went straight out of the station.
I am not going to let this happen I thought, taking a deep breath. It was ok to be afraid. I looked ahead; over the buildings the sun was high in the sky. The vision made me feel more comfortable. The hustle of the people in the trains, and the noisy tunnels, were far below my feet. I walked exhausted through one of the streets ahead and I arrived at a seven ways crossroads, where there was a pillar in the middle standing as a monument.
I sat down on a bench and I opened the London AZ I had with me, to try to find out where I was. To my surprise, it had no writing in it. The streets on the maps had no names. I thought I bought a faulty copy. There was nothing to read except for the two letters on the cover, which seemed to vibrate, moving quickly like they were trying to escape from the book. I shook my head, trying to clear my mind, but a second later the A and The Z flew away in front of my eyes.
I felt a warm draft followed by an incomprehensible noise. I paid close attention and I heard a whisper that was getting closer, stronger and noisier. Suddenly I was being surrounded by words. There were thousands of them coming towards me from each one of the seven streets that met at the crossroad.

They seemed to be running away from the earth that was trying to gobble them. The words were speaking their names into the wind, or at least that was what I thought. There were millions of voices and sounds speaking at once, and I couldn’t understand. They were coming towards me, like torrent, and I turned to see them running up the great pillar in front of me.

It seemed like the tower was uninhabitable, and the words were escaping toward the sky. I could see them climbing over each other, over the column, like a living tree bark. Sometimes a letter would detach from a word and fall onto the bench or floor, but eagerly it held onto another one passing by, creating new words that never before had existed, that didn’t have any meaning or made any sense, but some of them were beautiful.
I left the empty book on the bench and I reached out to touch the flow of words. It felt cold and soft, like a velvet dust. I smiled at the people walking in the street and I saw how some of the words were coming out from their throats but they didn’t seem to notice what was happening. Then I looked closer. They were paralyzed! They were facing the pillar with their eyes shut and their mouths opened, vomiting words.
In the sky, the words were accumulating in a black growing mass that, like a cloud, was spreading above the city. It moved to its borders and soon the blue sky disappeared leaving behind a moving black carpet of words. The rays of light hardly managed to get through the letters and it was getting darker, like in days of heavy winter storm.
The transforming scene wasn’t that amusing anymore. The words speech had turned into broken screams and the flow became increasingly aggressive covering the whole space around me to the point where I was completely submerged in it. Like being on the middle of a sand storm, I couldn’t see anything and I thought I had to move away and take cover somewhere. I walked against the current but it was hard to fight it. Moving slowly, with very short steps, I reached what it seemed a traffic light and I stood there holding it and thinking what was going to be my next move.
I was trying to make sense of what was going on. What was happening to the world, to the people? I felt afraid and I held on to the pole closing my eyes and begging for the chaos to finish. I could feel the words going through my body against my skin like a fast shoal of fish swimming on the ocean. I moved away from the epicentre and holding on the traffic light I reached out with my left hand away into the nothingness trying to grab something else to hold on to. I felt something firm and I leaned forward. It was a man’s arm. I jump desperately towards him embracing him from his waist, I stood up and I looked at his face. He was stiff as a rock. His mouth was also opened but the were no words coming out of it, It was like he had ran out of them, drained. I leaned my head in his chest to check if he was breathing. He was alive. Then the loud noise became a murmur and the current of words slowed down. I could see the street again; the words leaving the city, towards the black sky, were only a few now. I let go my hands off the man and looked up. The column of words was melting into the big stirring cloud. I could hear a muttering noise above me but a painful silence along the wordless streets.
On the centre of the crossroads, covering the monument, there was a pile of papers, books and magazines, which probably were dragged there by the flow. I grabbed one of the books, which was wide open with blank pages, and it looked very old and used to be a notebook. Then I took another one, and it was the same, then I took one of the magazines and there were only pictures on it, no letters. The written words on all those papers and books were gone.
I heard coughing and I turned back to see a woman waking up from her coma. I walked to her and I asked, “Are you ok?” She looked at me, with a confused expression on her face, and she didn’t answer. She looked around her and then she walked down one of the streets and disappeared at the next corner. Everybody was waking up and they all looked lost and puzzled. I try to talk to somebody else but I got no answer and the same with the next person. All over the city, people were walking in all sorts of directions. They didn’t talk or said anything it was like mute parade. People, like the books, seemed to have lost any trace of language or knowledge of the words.
I walked with no direction the main streets around me; there was no letters or words anywhere. The names of the shops were gone, the advertisements had no writing, the restaurant menus were blank and tube stations had no names. I tried to talk to more people and they looked at me like I was some sort of strange creature. The noise came back to the city, car claxons, buses and road works but it was missing the discussions, the chats at the coffee shops, people arguing. I passed by a CD’s shop and I realise the names of the artist were deleted from de cover of their albums and the song playing at the store, well know to me, didn’t have lyrics anymore. The city had come back to its normal rhythm but the words were missing everywhere. The image of a world without language came to my mind. I thought that years of History had vanished along with the language. The words were still above the world like a gloomy, whispering blanket that had substituted the blue sky.
The normality of the city started braking down soon after the wake up. Communication was impossible among people. All over the place there were fights and chaos again. People were trying to name things to find a meaning for them. A boy was crying pulling his mum’s jumper but she just kept looking at him not knowing what he wanted. The boy keeled on the floor weeping and the mother was trying to pull him back and then, desperate, she wept incapable of making sense. I went closer to them and I asked, “Can I help?” in my own language. The woman looked at me and I continued, “Can you talk?” with a curious look she grabbed me from my jacket and she started shouting,“Can you talk? Can I help? Can you talk? Can you talk?”. She kept on repeating my words and shouting them at me with anger. Then the people around us notice her, and listened to her. In a matter of seconds everybody was repeating the same words “Talk! Help!”. I stepped back from the crowd that was shouting at me crying for more language to be given. They pushed me back and I fell on the floor hitting my head against the pavement.
I dreamed with the sound of a thunder coming from the sky . In the dream the cloud was waving vigorously and it seemed was going to fall on top of the city. Everybody ran to take cover into the buildings. The thunders broke into long sentences that seemed to brush the ground and shake the buildings. After a few minutes a lyrical rain, words started falling over the city. Like the curtains of a theater falling onto the stage, the words were coming back to the ground. They were rolling down the streets going through open doors, into the drains, through the windows, into the people, they were taking back the empty places where the words had disappeared from earlier. There was something different about them. They looked different and then I realized I could understand them. I was reading and I was listening and I was comprehending their meanings. The words had changed. The language had changed.
I woke up in an hospital room and a doctor was looking at me.
“Can you talk?,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You hit your head on the street near Seven Dials. An ambulance brought you here a couple of hours ago.”
“You are speaking...”
He smiled, while checking my eyes with a torch, “Knocking your head can be quite serious, maybe you should rest for a while.” He took a pen and wrote something in a folder,“Is there anybody you would like to call to let them know you are here? You can use that phone over there”.
“Are you speaking in English?” I asked when he was about to leave.
“Ah, of course”, and he left, looking puzzled.
My head was spinning and I felt dizzy. I wanted to call my family. I took the phone and I dialed the international call.
“Hola?” said my mother on the other side of the line.
“Hello mum. It's me, Adrian. How are you? The flight went well and I just got to the house. Just calling to let you know I'm fine and that you don’t have to worry about me.”
“Adrian?” and then she spoke in a language that I couldn't understand.