Alternative Healing Practices
She’d been playing the word game obsessively for weeks now.
Every word she stumbled on, that fell unwittingly from a conversation partner’s lips, that she read, skimming through her magazines full of personal narrative and literary short fiction, that spun out of the day’s tragic news on the car radio, was grist for the vocabulary mill. Granary. Tether. Frankincense. She strongly believed that if you thought a word, it created the proper energy field for it to appear during play. She’d always been a fan of alternative healing practices.
Maybe the game was helping. It was the go-anywhere one that zips into a yellow cloth banana bag without so much as a paper board. Just letter tiles. Use them all and signal your opponent to reach for more. Rearrange them at will. First one done when the tile pool dries up wins.
It wasn’t like that other word tile game – stingy with its letters, its tile limits, its impossibly placed “triple word score” squares. This new game she loved was words free-form, with rules about cashing in unusable G’s or unwanted A’s for a trio of different options. Fresh chances. New possibilities. Enigmatic. Theocracy. Mosquito. Accepting change was important to turning the corner against what ails a person.
Her husband liked to remind her now and then that she had originally scoffed at his desire to own the game. She’d only bought it for some lesser holiday – Father’s Day? Valentine’s? – because he’d continued to talk about it week after week. Once it was in the house, it sat unused for months until one of them finally bothered to read the rules and the first game was on. Though he knew more than to mention it explicitly, he was glad that their evenings now held structure, albeit broken into lettered mosaics, that there was something to occupy her mind apart from human trafficking and the garbage floating like glassy islands in the ocean. Who was to say a few good words peppered with the charity of open vowels held any fewer curative properties than therapy? Apprehension. Odious. Alleviate.
Now, she caught herself out walking in town rearranging the letters of business names in her mind. This mastery buoyed her, like a magnesium supplement only free, like a protein powder, but less chalky. The mind and the body, they say, are one.
In her past, she had been a student of foreign language. She understood things like cultural constructs, like why there was a special word that—all by itself—was outfitted to equate with “beet soup” in Russian but not in Italian, why the equivalent of the phrase “excuse me” could go on for line after line in Japanese, but how in Spanish, one word sufficed. None of that mattered now. Getting older had taught her the advantages of zeroing in, and word play had honed her skills razor-sharp. These days, almost all of the pictures she took of the garden were of single petals, a drop of dew, the wing of a bee. Magnification. Lexicon. Hyperbole.
It’s like she had vanquished context from her world. In every syllable, an ulterior motive. Cardiovascular. Brandish. Elevate. If she settled on this thought for more than a moment, maybe it bothered her—here she was a wordsmith, a writer, after all, but mostly she didn’t dwell. Dwell, a good one to keep in mind for when she might need to blow a handful of consonants all at once. Just like she needed to fortify her stocks of words in the event of an overabundance of vowels: Iota. Inertia. Daiquiri. Being prepared, thinking ahead – these were part of selfcare: like knowing what to do with a K when you didn’t have a handy C. (Kite. Kiss. Skim.) And the ever-important, how to handle a Q before the U came along. (Qat – less common spelling of khat, a shrub grown in the Middle East and Africa, the leaves of which are chewed as a stimulant.)
She was almost sure that the totality of skills she was practicing through the game were applicable (yes, good one) to real life, even if she admitted the fact that she actually had no plans to apply the lessons, mostly because she had no plans for anything that involved real life. She was more interested in pulling the covers over her head. Real life had become overwhelming and isolated words were as close as she dared get to real for the time being. Fantasy. Gibberish. Seldom.
There were other types of words to stow away in one’s reserves, as well, like those that used doubles of the less common letters: Divvy. Buzzard. Quibble. There were also the star-studded words – the ones she was so proud of she couldn’t bear to break apart even if it meant throwing the game: Spaghetti. Oxymoron. Tintinnabulate. And, of course, there were the words that fit both criteria: Doppelganger.
Her husband, whom she had always thought of as extremely intellectual, began to ask things that shifted her opinion of him a little more with every game. How many E’s does freezer have? he’d say. Or, how do you spell plausible? The jury was still out on his contribution to her wellness, though he did get credit for hitting on the initial idea of the game that would become a balm. She recoiled at his questions, as anyone would in her position. Mostly, though, she ignored him and continued to focus on the task at hand. Mucilaginous. Ghastly. Synergistic.
Today, since her husband was working for another two hours and she couldn’t yet play, she sat on the deck in the new rays of summer across from a dark chocolate-covered caramel. She had placed the candy on a jar lid in the sun atop the padded rocking chair to thaw. When she’d bought the box of them, she’d put them in the freezer (how many E’s, indeed!) in order to keep her from eating them too fast. The plan was failing. Opposite her, the chocolate was beginning to sweat. It was a less effective and more fattening route to alternative healing, and she wished her husband would hurry up and finish work. Treason. Languid. Impatient.
One could say her anxiety appeared out of nowhere, but really, in a world so unnerving, weren’t there obvious reasons for someone to seek out respite, regardless of how it might manifest? These days, when she closed her eyes, she saw the lettered tiles in her mind. In any spare moment, she was trying to arrange them. A meditation of sorts. A sense of control. Everything with a place in the circle. Nothing left over. Jarring. Rudimentary. Foundation.
Her pre-teen son entered the yard with his friends in mid-play—some invented game. Their bodies long and laughing, the three boys threw a ball back and forth constantly shouting out new rules as they went. She was jealous of their fluid ways, their disdain for detail. Agility. Covetous. Egocentrism.
That night, she would again spill the tiles on the table, grateful her husband was willing to go head to head one more time, even knowing he’d lose. And for twenty minutes, the collective breath of the world would ease, and a magical calm could take over. It was of no consequence that she understood all too clearly it wouldn’t last, that she knew it intuitively, without anyone having to spell it out for her.
