By Valentina P. Grohovaz – Toronto,ON

I have always been fascinated with the spaces between words. The pauses between I and love and you and so and much. The break between when and will and you and stop and hurting and me. At times the vastness of the world requires us to remove the silences, attach our words by strings and on kites so as to keep them from getting lost. Once upon a time people were so spread apart they kept bundles of string in their pockets to send off an ican’tdothisanymore, a pleasecomebackthisisthelasttimei’llhurtyou, and on occasion an iwasnevermeanttoloveyou . When the string was tied and the words, wrapping around themselves, formed a makeshift kite, their owners would release them into the wind. If the string wasn’t bound tightly enough, pleasedon’tleaveme became leavemeplease . Miscommunication was inevitable in this age of string, before the invention of the art of silence. There were times when no amount of string could keep the words together, times when the distance between thoughts was greater than the distance between people. It was at this point when we discovered the value of silence. Spaces were placed between words, pauses for effect, emphasis, so much so that eventually we valued silence more than words themselves. We valued the time between “I can’t” and “keep loving you” for the possibility that “I can’t” was followed by “live without you”. Silence gave us hope. Silence kept us guessing. Silence became too much for us to handle. The anticipation was too much, and so we stopped adding words altogether. We embraced silence more than we should have, and so iloveyoumorethananything could be mistaken for morethananythingiwantobealone with one mistaken gaze, one indefinite pause. We should have kept the string, maybe we would have learned how to love by now.