I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”, well, I wholly disagree with that, almost as much as I disagree with the saying “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me”. Both of these sayings are greatly underestimating the power of words, angry ones especially. Words have started and ended great wars, great loves, and great friendships since the dawn of time (well, the dawn of language anyway). This is the story of my experience with angry words.
Growing up, I was really lucky to have the older sister(older by eight years) that I did. We both got into all kinds of mischief during the summers, when our parents left for work every day and we were left to our own devices. We had only one rule: never tell our parents anything. Now, what you’ve got to understand for this story to make any sense, is that me and my sister fought all the time. We’d yell at each other and play cruel pranks on each other not on a daily basis, but on an hourly one, and so it happened that during one such fight I crossed the invisible, unidentifiable, imaginary line we had set as the border of telling and not telling on each other. I don’t remember much of the fight, only the words that officially took it too far.
“Yah, well you’re a fat volcano!”
My declaration bounced off the clean, bright, boring white walls of our living room as my frightened, frantic, six year old mind clawed desperately at the words, trying to suck them back in and hide them in the closet with the rest of my secrets.
To this day, I still don’t know if my sister ever figured out that “volcano” was a reference to her temperament, and how easily she exploded at me. All I know is that my words that day, as cruel as they were towards my sister, were equally cruel towards me. I learned that very well indeed as I watched my sister bite into a bright red strawberry that night, blood-red (or Elmo-red, I was, after all, only six years old) juice running down her chin and dripping from her fingers, while I sat and watched, banned from touching the delicious treat.
I’d gained the knowledge that night, even though I’d missed out on the forbidden fruit.