Trap street

The word susurrus
    is a trap street.

No actual human has ever used it in conversation.
But writers keep stealing it from one another’s lexical maps.

Trap street,
as in an act of artifice placed by the mapmaker in their map
to catch would-be thieves of their craft.

But wait long enough,
and the original mapmaker is lost to time;
and every map now shows the same fictitious entry,
until the people that live thereabouts create the street
that they find in all their maps.
And one of them even uses the word susurrus
to refer to the sweet murmurs in their beloved’s street,
explaining affectionately how they ran into the word in an old dictionary.
Then the tale of Love in Susurrus Street inspires generations
until it reaches the stars with us,
as real now as transubstantiation or mir’aj,
an indisputed part of humanity’s heritage forever.

Our encyclopedias, be it British or Galactic,
our dictionaries, printed or electronic,
and even our memories,
stored now as precipitations in some shared cloud,
are probably already full of such susurrae.

Such as the platypus,
both the word and the so-called animal,
which no one has ever laid eyes on.

Or beer, surely,
the tastiness of which is so oft repeated that
no one noticed in centuries that it has gone bad,
the whole batch, all of it.

Or money.

Or shame,
which was never needed
except by those who would bind souls to their broken egos.

Like actual trap streets in some Dark City,
transforming to the whims of some deranged mind
and rearranging themselves into a labyrinth
of endless night, beyond which await the patient stars.

The eternal battle between exuberance and apathy
is decided in our imagination.
For every Starry Night,
there is the peril that in another generation
it will be overtaken by indifference,
since no one will have seen it
except through a screen
even when they are in front of it at the gallery
—but for one starry eyed child who is moved by it enough
to one day sing or write a new one.
Every love faces this same peril
between decaying into the familar
—even rewriting its own origin story into one of disdain—
or reinventing itself.
Love stays only if it is new again.

Who is to say that we are not created by beauty, rather than it by us?
Maybe it does not matter if a street started as a trap,
not anymore than if love was misplaced
as long as we become beautiful residing within it.
Maybe the proverbial inadequacy of words to match beauty is exaggerated.
Maybe some words are so beautiful that reality feels inadequate to their calling,
like when our broken selves gleam brighter than we think possible
when we are called to love.

Like petrichor,
as we imagine the smell of dessicated earth greeting rain like a returning lover.
When the heart is willing, the nose finds a way.

Like your own name,
as whispered into your ear for the first time again,
where your shivering attention decides who you are yet to be.

Melih Sener