A short story

She had been waiting for a while now and wasn’t angry anymore. Finally, she was called. After the robotic ‘hellos’ she sat down and waited for the news. The words came out of his mouth and she understood them because she knew the language he was using to talk to her. The meaning of the words was very easy to understand, what was not easy to do was to fully understand what those words meant in her life. She knew that words are not only letters arranged together following the rules of the language being used. She knew that they are change makers, blow givers, chill makers. The words that came out of his mouth were all of that and more. But she’d never felt their power so intensely until that moment.

By the end of the conversation, or monologue since she mostly listened and nodded as he was talking, she felt very empty and couldn’t quite understand the feelings that were emerging. So she walked out of the room ready to tell her friends and family what was going on. But the words did not come. Those same words that she understood and that caused a turmoil of feelings in her chest were now dancing in her brain ready to come out. She thought she just had to repeat what she’d heard and that it was going to be easy. What she didn’t know was that now, those same words were so much heavy and every time she tried to grab them to let them out, they squeezed her chest and hurt. They hurt so much.

That’s when she knew. She finally understood how she felt. She was scared and so sad.