blog.Jelmer Oosthoek.nl

“I’m verbal!”, he screamed, “I am so completely fucked up in my mind”. Verbal was the word he used a lot the last couple of hours. He used it to describe his predicamentto himself. “From now on I will verbalize everything to great extent!”, he had written down somewhere on a piece of paper which later would lead him to even more of this type of craziness. He wasn’t aware of that yet when he first started to use the word and I have to be very frankly in saying I cannot fully predict him becoming a complete loon too. For all it matters I could be the one who will cross this point of no return. “So how are you related to this ‘verbal’ guy anyway?”, you may ask. Well I don’t know. I don’t know him yet, he just popped up in my mind a few seconds ago. “So is this the way you start writing stories?”, I can envision you asking me. My answer will be brief and swift, “I don’t know, this writing just occurred.”

He left his apartment one morning, a couple of weeks before he would start using the word ‘verbal’. It was the day this specific word was introduced to him in a peculiar way. It was such a way that he remembered it. It would stay dormant for those weeks after which it burst out of his subconscious mind into his awareness. This day however his awareness was limited to a girl. He was thinking about her all the time, she was all he wanted in life. Of course she was beautiful, if she wasn’t this story wouldn’t have made sense, but she had something else, an extra quality he alone saw. Or that was what he thought. He also thought he alone could give her what she needed. If she needed anything at all. He was sure she did, but I have to say I am still not sure about it.

They bumped into each other when he walked across the street of his apartment to the cafeteria. They hadn’t talked yet, he hadn’t been confident enough to do that, but before this encounter they had shared eyes, as he would like to describe it. “Man, look out!”, she shouted as the action of this intense physical contact caused a sudden rush of fear, from her side it was. She was OK, no scratch, but he wasn’t. He was shaken, no body malfunctions luckily, same as hers, but a mind thing. He was completely surprised by her fury. He had envisioned their first communicative encounter to be more of a, well to say honest, of a fairytale like encounter. He said sorry, with a damped creaky voice and looked towards the ground. He didn’t want to look her in the eyes, and walked further. She turned and shouted “you’re not a very verbal type aren’t you?”. He said nothing and walked further, feeling no ground below his feet.

So now you know about the ‘verbal’ thing. The word was soon forgotten and he dived again into his normal daily activities. This woman had been a dream for him anyway and he decided, in a subconscious manner, that he wouldn’t think about her anymore. He continued his life those following weeks and somehow didn’t see her anymore, that is until one hour before this story started.

She saw him first and walked towards him. He saw she approached, became afraid and tried to walk faster and avoid her. But it was too late, she caught up with him and here they stood, face to face, one meter apart. He didn’t know what to say but that didn’t matter, she did the talking. He listened. She said she had seen him looking at her the last couple of months. Except for these last couple of weeks of course, how interesting. “You like me, don’t you?”, she asked and he couldn’t do nothing but nod assent. “Yes you do, I noticed. Well, look, you are really the silent type, not very verbal. So I’m sorry to say, it won’t work.” All the time he hadn’t been able to look at her. But now, some invisible force moved his head up. He looked into her eyes, and saw her smile, albeit a smile of pity. She was very beautiful indeed. His thoughts started to race inside his head, he knew he had to saw something. Some seemingly awkward moments pasted after which he said the one thing which somehow was most actively present in his mind, “verbal”.

Minutes after she had left he still stood at the same place, frozen in space and if one had been able to look inside his head, which we as spectators can, also frozen in time. Somehow, after some unaccounted moments, after rain started to fall, after the sun had set, after his clothes were soaked, after his limbs became stiff his body suddenly regained motion again and he moved himself inside his apartment.

“Verbal, verbal, verbal, verbal, verbal, verbal”, he thought. The word blocked others words from entering his mind. A buildup started, the other words wanted their release. They weren’t used to this type of containment. To a certain degree he always contained his thought of course, which is a normal thing for an introvert person like himself, but this time, there seemed to be a total blockage. It couldn’t continue for ever and he must have known it somewhere inside his skull because the eruption took place that evening.

“Verbal, verbal, verbal, ver…”, further it never came because he started talking. Talking out loud. Talking which turned into shouting, screaming, growling. That he never had done before. He released himself. “Goddamnit, what am I doing! Why the fuck was I thinking about verbal and not just performing it, acting it. Why wasn’t I verbal! Why wasn’t I talking! It’s so damn simple!” And so it was.