This morning as I descend gradually towards the station I realise I’ve been kicking the same white pebble since the glary white weatherboard, number twenty-seven, on your street.
I’m thinking about the groaning incline it’s going to be on the way home later tonight if you can’t pick me up.
Please,
please
pick me up.
Blackboards out the front of coffee shops in this suburb read the worst arrangments of words ever committed to a surface:
- All you can do is chai your best!
- Espresso yo’ self
- Better latte than never
It’s sacrilege to the human language. There was a week recently, maybe even two of them, where you used the term a lot. S-a-c-r-i-l-e-g-e. You must have heard it somewhere, enjoyed the power of it, the way your heart pumped as your tongue pushed the –dge against your back teeth in disgust. You must have looked it up, I thought and committed it to memory.
Sacre– sacred and leggere– to steal. It seemed you all of a sudden felt positively robbed, all of the time. Steak without mustard, filthy Nikes, a Sunday without the newspaper, clothing in bed. I was often offending.
Every time you used it I felt as though you were pricking a needle into my spine. My eyes were dizzy from rolling in there sockets. When you used it twice over one dinner I decided I couldn’t handle the flippant misuse the term any longer. I pulled up a search engine to present you the correct definition and context of your new favourite word.
When I read the two sentences below the ten letters I learnt two very important things which I will never be able to unmind:
- The definition of sacrilege
- I am not right about everything, not nearly anything
Yellow Days 