Verbal Decrescendo

She left the words she knew how to say in July. She did it one at a time, one random word after the next, in the midst of a startlingly intellectual atmosphere made a thousand times more intense by solitude. Her struggle was a unique specimen, a hissing, clawing fierce little thing out of its cage. It charged and railed and scratched against what it knew not rather than fended for itself the only way it knew out in the dark. Finally in one last desperate assault it flailed weakly with the one word left in its body, choking, until it bled to death in the gutters leading down, down below.

Her songs were the first to go, their rhythm vibrating away to oblivion in a prolonged motion of descrescendo. The strums of the guitar all at once drowned in an orchestra of dissonance as the melodies long marked in memory abandoned their posts, sometimes in groups, most times individually and disappeared to nowhere. Soon after she began halting in the middle of speeches and conversations, in private monologues, in leisure reading when alone, even, in whispers in the dark. Books were a blur all of a sudden, fiction fumbling for space in what was left of her literacy. Staggering, her vowels battled for their identities but soon started confusing them with the others'. It was not long after--having insured their defeat--that they dragged the consonants into the war, who lost, I suppose, much more than the fluidity they needed to slip off the tongue and roll over. She stammered then, punctuated more than ever, all attempts at words constituting sounds that were not sounds and then, CRASH.

Right in front of her, a feast took place. The Blackhole of all things said, read, heard, and written consumed the last of its meals. Its menu were none other than the words she recognized as her own.