Words

-He taught her words, a whole language. Before that, she did not speak to his kind. Not if speaking means knowing more than one word. She’d stare at him intently as he annunciated every syllable. She’d smile at him sweetly, even before he annunciated syllables for her and she began to learn words. He thought they were communicating even before she learned his language. She thought she was learning his language to communicate with him. She learned quickly. He was a good teacher. They were both motivated by what they thought. They’d spend hours together, trying to communicate. Mostly in coffee shops where the signs were written in her words. She’d read them to him. It was somewhere there, in between her reading her words to him and her learning his, he began to learn. He took a class to learn, her words. He learned quickly. He thought if they each learned half of each other’s words, they would completely understand each other. She laughed, her laugh turned into a wide smile, when she found out. She began studying his words even harder. She made much progress and soon they were speaking mostly using his words, with an occasional burst of hers, which he understood. They’d spend even more time together, as they discovered many of their thoughts were similar and they enjoyed many of the same things. Sometimes he would initiate a conversation using only her words and she would respond in kind. She would smile sweetly the whole time, he struggled more with her words than she ever did with his. Even so, she loved the fact that he tried. It always made her giggle. When she’d giggle he’d always wonder about what he had just said. Then he’d laugh with her. Those conversations were always fairly brief, but they both enjoyed them. The laughter and giggles they brought.
They started spending time together outside of coffee shops. They’d hang out with her friends at karaoke rooms. She’d sing with her friends using her words. He could never really understand what they were singing about and she never volunteered translation. They would hang out with his friends at art house theaters and she would wiggle around in her seat making faces. She couldn’t understand his fascination with this type of cinema. They’d often return to the coffee shops where now, he could read the signs and menus but still felt a little odd as there were few there who could hold a conversation using his words. All the same, they would spend hours there, as if the coffee’s steam was enough to translate words and create worlds. Sometimes they would sit quietly on the coffee couches made of straw. She, wrapped in a small blanket, the shop offered. He, smiling as she still shivered slightly in the night’s cold. Their conversations grew shorter as they had informed each the other on the day’s happenings as they day had progressed, through a constant instant message conversation, that like those in other places sometimes jumped from his words to hers. Again, in brief spurts of boxes and lines. There was something, he thought, in their silence, in the simplicity of being there, together. She would smile but it would dissipate and sometimes what she was thinking, he would never have guessed at. He liked the silence, he liked the shared moment. He would order for them, using her words, but could not hold a conversation with the server, much beyond that. She would sit there smiling as he attempted to use more words than he knew and then she’d jump in.
There was less enjoyment in the karaoke rooms for him and in the art house films for her. They started spending less time together. They would still have coffee afterward, but she would not tell him about the songs she sang and he wanted to but did not tell her about the movies he watched, if he had she would have simply listened and not been very interested, thus getting bored and squirming. There were movies she wanted to watch but they weren’t of much interest to him and with the pattern they had created, she decided to go with some friends. Some friends she had met through her job. Some friends he had never met. That same night, he decided to go to one of his favorite coffee shops, one where the signs and the menus were written in his words, which he sometimes attended with his friends. Friends she had met. Friends she had thought well of. They drank coffee, him and his friends, and had long conversations. At times they laughed so hard their brows beaded with sweat and they were forced to spend moments of silence, filling their lungs with air. There was conversation, he thought, unfit for her ears and he thought it good she was not there. He enjoyed the night, but it bugged him that in that whole day he had not heard from her. He had not seen her since the night before, when they sat amidst her words scrawled on signs and written in menus, coffee steam dissipating as the cold became contagious and words froze and were not heard. She did smile once or twice but he had had nothing to do with it. He smiled as he walked to his car. He walked past a man talking on a cell phone, the wire hanging from a store’s outside outlet. It made him think more of the call that he hadn’t received and he called her. He stood there, in the middle of the parking lot, the shadows obscuring him. He dialed and he listened. The phone rang three times and he heard her outgoing message. He hung up before the beep. He looked around him. All smiles faded. It was the same message, or similar, but there had been a different tone in the voice. Maybe it was him, but it sounded a little happier. He got in his car and drove home. He hadn’t smoked in months. There had been something about teaching someone his words that made it unnecessary. That night he sat there, at his kitchen table and smoked half a pack before bed. By then there was a faint light outside his window. He drew the shades and closed his eyes.
He did not hear from her again, except for a quick rendezvous they at a Starbucks, where she ordered and held a conversation with the barrista whom she knew by name and didn’t charge her. She gave the barrista a peck on the cheek before walking away to have that last conversation. She said something along the lines of how his words had opened new worlds to her. She grasped his hand and said thank you before she left with the barrista. He just sat there and finished both their coffees. She had held it in front of her, the cup, but never drank from it, and she had put it down right before she walked away. His recompense.