Words Fail Me

(Somebody just please bang my head against Aigues Mortes's Medieval walls.)

I dreamt that I was cutting chunks off my upper legs and tossing the meat into a boiling casserole already half-filled with red matter--more of my thighs, I assume, and some tomato sauce.

Playing dream analyst I figure that the gory scene is my vision of life right now. A bit of self-sacrifice seems necessary.

The giving up of job, family, and friends is the least of it. I had been thinking to quit magazine publishing for two years; most of my friends were living and working in other countries; and in my family it's not unusual to not keep in touch.

What is hard is finding out that without any real disabilities I have become deaf and dumb. After working 11 years in media, writing for newspapers and magazines, hosting a television show even, suddenly I am unable to communicate. Imagine it.

I remember in the beginning I would be petrified to go out alone; in bars I couldn't even order coffee properly, so instead of my usual big cup, American-style, I had to learn to like espresso, a few potent tablespoonfuls in a demi-tasse.

My abilities have somewhat progressed ("Un cafe long," I have learned to say when I want the coffee diluted.), but it still takes tremendous effort. At parties, my brain is constantly working, synapses sending electrical pulses at great speed just so I can keep up with the banter. Two-thirds into the night, my brain is fried.

Sometimes I feel them, the mob of articles definite and indefinite; verbs regular and irregular; the question forms, the prepositions, and especially all those nouns whose masculinity and femininity I have always to determine, I feel them getting restless inside my cranium, the nouns deciding to use their gender to reproduce more of themselves, until I feel it so crowded up there that the foreign words are about to erupt out of my ears, or worse, split cracks in my skull.