I love to play with words, I love to dig them up. I turn the words over and over. Where did it come from, who used it and how? Connections surprise and astonish every time. I take a beautiful word I hear for the first time and commit it to memory like a child who leaves his favorite dessert for last. I don’t spend it right away. Even if it comes to my mind at times of stealing and grabbing, I silence my mind and set aside a time when I can pay due attention to it.
Then I make excuses to love that word even more. I’ll play like a child. I’ll use it in an unlikely place and laugh at myself. Is that okay? Never was, never should be. I take it from where it doesn’t fit and carefully put it exactly where it should be. It will be so beautiful that I’ll sit in front of it and enjoy it. I read it again and again, the more I read it, the better it gets. And the pleasure of doing that can be measured in very few words. Maybe it’s like watching the calm shimmering sea with the lights playing on it, maybe it’s like feeling the cool evening breeze in your hair. Come on, let’s decorate some more. Let it be like watching the sunset without speaking, with the one you love the most. Everyone knows this feeling, even those who have not experienced it, because words are magic, they communicate the unknown.
There is not a word but a sentence that gives me this feeling these days. The closing sentence of a phone call at the end of a very tired and complicated day. What my interlocutor said while I was running away from one of the most feared feelings, uncertainty. How will this end? Will I be able to do it? Will I be enough for everything that is expected of me in this chaos? As my mind races through these things, the sentence is: Remember that I love you very much!
It’s all quiet, isn’t it? When uncertainty disappears and a sense of certainty takes over. Repeat this sentence a few times calmly. Swirl it around on your tongue, savoring it like candy. Has the anxiously beating heart returned sweetly to its own rhythm? In fact, if there is the word “love” in a sentence, everything else is usually overshadowed by it. Love is such a thing that it paints its surroundings in its own color and you can no longer see any other color there. But not this one. The sun of this sentence is “remember”. “Remember how much I love you!” Look, everything else has fallen silent again. The weight of trying to be human, or of feeling alone, of being left alone, of times when there is too much to do and not enough to do… This is the word that anchors you where you are in all this rush. Remember! Even if you hear it from a person’s mouth, don’t think of it as belonging to them. Go back far, far back. At the top. Remember. You were what? How have you been? Where were you? What did you come up with out of all these uncertainties? One meaning is “waking up”, those who know the language say. Now it’s even more beautiful. Then let the word hold hands with love again. Let the address come from the most cherished interlocutor: “Remember that I love you very much!”
Since we like to play with words, let’s turn this sentence around a bit, make it passive. Let us bring it so that anyone who wants to put a smile on their face can take it out of their heart pocket and look at this beautiful sentence without looking for an interlocutor, so that they will find peace, so that their hearts will light up. Let us say to those who want to find the sweet rhythm of their heart: “Remember how much you are loved!”
