Dotted Lines
There is an urgent message we store at the back of our tongue, trained by our primordial sense of fight and flight, and the prophetic nature the heavens bless our spheres of cognition, a duality that produce an incomparable speech (maybe incomprehensible too) which stuns the ears and shakes the heart; this is the speech of anger.
When anger consumes the heart, humans obtain a very sharp sense of word choice; they utter(or shout) sentences for effect, rather than for meaning. They take the root word of any adjectives, and compound the suffix “-est” to achieve superlativity in their speech; that they feel the extreme ends of emotions in the situation they are in, where no one could ever compare, comprehend or invalidate their immediate, intense experience. Through this isolation, they feel truth on their side, as they feel empowered.
This empowerment is often mistaken as a proof of righteousness, while in fact, such power arise from humans’ in-built response to any agitating stimulant; the fight or flight response, where our bodies will be charged by adrenaline, increasing blood flow and heightened awareness/sense, such as was felt by our mortal ancestors when facing a roaring lion in the Safari, just shy of a few million years ago. With age washing away at our species’ feet and through evolution of human life, words become a tool, alongside its communicative functions, and as tools are as susceptible to the potential as weaponry, words do not exclude itself from this utilisation. As sharp and devastating hand-held axe was in our primitive ancestors palm, words can be as deadly but swifter, and invisible.
To fight means to consolidate all of our perceptions, emotions, faith and thought into one immovable momentum, and ceases when we have either won or lost. There are no in-between; a binary configuration. Therefore we tend to (or purposefully) deliver the heaviest blows, swing at the widest angle, and in a verbal battle, the most impactful sentences we can utter, in hopes that it would end the fight as soon as possible (as you may have noticed, any fight will be temporary and would be insufferable for both parties if it lasts longer than a minute), and this calls upon our ability to conjure hurtful sentences, words that can impair a person’s emotional state; daggers of expressions that stabs swiftly, whether we degrade their appearances, nit-pick their inconsistencies in behavior, or embalm their shameful pasts into the discourse, anything which will ensure a pierce, a dent, a blow or an irreparable defect in the opponents’ mind. In this moment, meaning flees from our existence (along with bits of humanity), and all that is left is surviving, because to survive, is the beginning of all meaning.
Words in a heated argument (or a fight rather, since arguments can have sound and rational basis) will be devoid of meaning. It is only meant for effect; its significance is not on what is conveyed but on its damage to the opponent. It is not meaningful exchange, it is a primal behavior, mere swinging of lexical fists. There is nothing to be found there other than misery on one part, and a little less of it in another.
The ending usually leaves a mark on both parties, with questions piling on top of one another but unanswered, severed by dotted lines. However, only one will walk away without feeling defeated.
