You called me in the morning and what came from our bleeding mouths was alien.

The night before it happened, we knew something (it--anything) was coming - some did - it pushed on our shoulders with great speckled hands, old hands wearing too many rings, and we pushed back -- a final well of words pushed through us, out our mouths and ears and the spaces between our ribs.

My sister babbled with the neighbors in the streets, scrawling great chalk words we would puzzle over the next day, know what they were and how they got there but not how to decode their decaying forms. Every street in every town bore some child's hieroglyphs and in the next days of confusion these children were vaulted to the height of gods and then toppled again when not one of them could tell the rest of us what they had meant. By then most had been washed away.

The night before it happened, we kissed and talked for some strange glowing reason. I tore my lips against your gnawing teeth. You called me in the morning and what came from our bleeding mouths was alien. Harsh and tender, words naturally made of trips and sibilance, melted together - you sounded like a bruise. I wanted to touch you, just to press against your body with my bashed-up fingertips.
All I understood was longing --
All anyone understood was longing --

Secrets didn't matter anymore. Those kept stayed in their dark country, never to come out again in body language. Soon bodies were language. People, almost strangers, would stare and touch each other's faces and try to understand. Lonely preset souls wandered into school or work and had elaborate conversations with hands, whole rooms filled with fluttering light and dark feathered moths. Nothing got done. Survival in this strange alternate world was everything. Somewhere, sometime, there were riots and looting; the video was broadcast on the two remaining tv channels. People used their computers for tables, barricades, anything so they didn't idly boot up and see an endless beautiful expanse of gibberish. Soon our worlds shrunk to each other, my world shrunk to those around me, room by room.
Even that was too much to navigate. Everything fell apart as we got lost in each other's silence.

For a few weeks the neighborhood was quiet except for the howling of dogs, howling our loss when we were too polite to do so. Then the music started. Music laced with languages we once knew; the notes were constant, like mathematics, a language we could always use.

"The violin is a human voice" I remember someone saying, I remember it like I remember being two years old, vaguely and lacking details. But that voice under the lip-red whispering japanese maple was not human like mine, it rose above my out-of-use cracking single voice, it brought people out of their houses while mine still drives them back in to talk to themselves over frying eggs and useless books.

Books left open like love affairs with friends now dead, or married, or somehow gone; love affairs come out too, because no one can lie with their eyes and hands anymore. At first there is so much incomprehensible screaming, windows smashed, nightgowns sundered with all due melodrama,

but then we realized to the gnashing, wailing piano streets away that we are too lonely for one another, too lonely to begrudge other avenues of nighttime communication.

After a few months of silence no one can stand it.
Everyone talks to themselves in the streets. Everyone is crazy; everyone needs to relearn themselves, their language. The clanking of worlds of words against each other is enough to shut down New York entirely. I take notes on myself, for a few weeks illustrated with looping symbols that I might have learned in a dream, or a long-past life. My limbs hold the answers. Limbs are the answers, symbols decoration.

We try to teach each other, simple things that can be mimed or pointed to, nouns and verbs. Harder to navigate is syntax; without comparable words it is like having a moral code without abstraction. We live our sentences day to day, not knowing what situations are equivalent. Most don't even care, can live without translation, in gestures and pictures. Artists are rich, the poets have all jumped off bridges. Even the longest headspace lovers, the intellectually promiscuous, soon dissolve to the language they know best: each other.

But some resolute friends soldier on, making headway into the strangest territory. A year from that last night I walk through the gravel with bare feet and see two boys lounging back into the soft hands of the park lawn at twilight, trading words so that later they can point at the stars and wonder at how they are the only ones not entirely alone with the universe.