say what you mean

but try to frame it like you imagine the other person could possibly understand it. Choose your words carefully. There are a lot of languages in the world and I don't mean Spanish. Words come in like hitchhikers, dirty jeans and jangling carabiners, hefty backpacks. They may have a vague destination, North, or, a specific one, Las Vegas, but they definitely want to go somewhere or they'd have kept their thumbs tucked in their fists.

The main three words anyone wants to hear are: "How," "Are," and "You."

Or, "How are you, really." The first secret about a girl is that all she really wants or needs is to splash her cesspool of pain, leak or bleed it onto whosoever has a sponge. You could say, 'healing is a collective process' and women are the evolutionary stokers of community. Oh, is someone else righteously indignant? She is absolved, if the burden is shared. If a cathartic partner is absent, she will turn instead to Lauryn Hill. That is the second secret of girls. They are all listening to Lauryn Hill right now. I am not wrong about this.

The third secret of everyone, really, is that no matter how the words come, plane, train, automobile, song, poem, shouted hoarsely in the center of a train station, typed furiously with cold fingers, slurred through dentist's gauze: everyone wants to be heard. We try to use our best language but beyond that must depend on the minute fluttering of eyelashes, the tiniest motions of fingers, the absorbency of the sponge, the destination of the car.

Originally published over at A Thing of Today.