Forgotten Dialects of the Heart
I have discovered one of my most reliable kinks: characters who share a private language, who instead of falling back on "I love yous" and conventional gestures, build their own signs and signifiers, who find in pressing their foreheads together, or an insult, or in saving each other in wildly dangerous ways a language that's a better suited to the complex tangle of messy and uncomfortable feeling they carry around inside of them but prefer not to reflect on much, let alone talk about. What they feel simply is, the way the sky is blue and gravity rides everything.
My characters never talk to each other about love.
As Jack Gilbert puts it, in his precise and lovely fashion:
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.
What I love is pairings where there simply isn't language for what they feel: emotions that are vast and strange and ultimately unconveyable.
My characters never talk to each other about love.
As Jack Gilbert puts it, in his precise and lovely fashion:
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.
What I love is pairings where there simply isn't language for what they feel: emotions that are vast and strange and ultimately unconveyable.