Damn
Your grandfather says this constantly. He’s a tall, stooped man with pale lips and a thick German accent, and the word comes out like he’s trying to cough something up. You’re six years old before you even realize it’s a word. You want to ask him what it means, but he scares you; he’s kind but he’s loud, and his motives are inscrutable. You find out in Sunday School (which you will attend until you are seven, and then quit because your parents stop caring) that “damn” is part of “damnation,” which has something to do with Hell. Hell terrifies you, and for the first time in your life, you think of a word as something with actual power. Something arcane and violent and loaded with intent. Your grandfather dies when you are eight. There are viewing hours before the funeral, and you stand by yourself next to the coffin, looking at the body. It’s a complicated situation. There’s grief, and there’s confusion, but more than anything, there’s a deep, fundamental sensation of concern; a fear of knowledge that trembles close enough to touch, but you don’t want it, you don’t want it at all. “Damn,” you say, and blush. The blush lasts the entire ride home, and when your mother asks what’s wrong, you tell her you’ve been crying.

Dickhead
This is what your mother calls your father during a fight. You aren’t supposed to hear the fights, but neither of them make any effort to keep their voices down, not even when it’s eleven o’clock at night, which is later than you’ve ever been awake before. The fight is about a seven on the fight scale. There’s a seven every couple of months, although you don’t always stay awake for it. The word your mother uses stays with you. You know what “dick” means, but you don’t know exactly what one looks like, and for weeks after, you keep imagining a fussy little gentleman in a suit with a kind of fat pink hose sticking up from between his shoulders. You and your best friend Louise spend a lazy Sunday afternoon calling each other the word over and over again, giggling so hard that Louise’s brother tells you to shut up from the next room, and that makes you giggle harder. When you’re 23, your boyfriend calls you a slut so you steal his phone and scroll through his text messages (you hope he’s cheating, or maybe he’s a drug dealer), and then you call him–but you can’t even get the word out. You know what it looks like now. It’s just too funny. He storms off, and you never see him again, which is pretty much okay. There is no scale on which he registers.

Bitch
You’re out for a jog when you’re 10, although since you’re 10, it’s just a long walk with intervals of sprinting. You think about how it sucks to have your parents for parents, and how you wish Lois Duncan was your mom. You go past a bush peeking out of the tree-line, then come back to it, and try and decide if what you’re looking at are the kind of berries you can eat, or the kind of berries that will kill you. You aren’t planning on actually eating them or anything, but it’s fun to wonder. You start imagining yourself as stranded in the woods after a hike, and you’d have to fend for yourself, drinking water from streams and following moss and maybe making friends with a deer. And you could build a hut, and everyone would be looking for you and they’d be super worried, but you’d send some kind of a message somehow, something really cool and totally laid back, about how you needed to take some time for yourself, and everything was fine. Maybe you’d meet a forest ranger. Maybe he’d have a beard. A truck passes you on the road. The truck’s window is open, and the driver yells the word at you and then he’s gone. You stand there. It hurts. You look at the woods, and you decide they are stupid. The streams are stupid, the deer is stupid, the forest ranger with the beard is, is stupid. You are not crying. You pick a handful of berries and stick them in your pocket. Then you run most of the way home. Every time a car goes by, you close your eyes. Back in your room, you put the handful of berries in your sock drawer, and leave them there. In a few weeks they shrivel into hard little stones and you throw them away.

Shit
When you’re 13, your best friend Louise’s big sister, who is 19, and has a lip ring, and knows how to use sarcasm, is working as a film projectionist. This is a big deal. Melissa is practically a super-hero, and you sometimes think you want to be her, except no way, no way could you be that cool. One night, she invites you and Louise to a special showing at the theater where she works; something about previewing the movie beforehand with the staff to make sure it was put together right. Outsiders are not usually allowed in, but Melissa is Melissa. Louise’s mom (who is so much cooler than your mother) drives you over, and you wait in the lobby till the theater closes, feeling anxious, because you’re about to Break The Rules, and you aren’t sure that’s something you can do. It’s easy, though. The movie is Die Hard 2. You haven’t seen the first Die Hard, and you don’t watch a lot of action movies, but this one is the most awesome thing that’s ever existed, that is your totally objective review. Bruce Willis keeps saying “shit” and it’s hilarious. Melissa sits in the back with the other employees, throwing popcorn and shouting at the screen. When Bruce Willis stabs a man in the eye with an icicle, Melissa yells, “Ice to see you!” and everybody cracks up. Louise doesn’t crack up. You realize she’s shaking, and even in the dim light from the movie screen you can see she’s gone white. You also realize how loud the movie is, how violent, how overwhelming. You wonder what it’s like to have Melissa for a big sister, what it feels like to have to live up to someone else’s big deal. For once, you aren’t jealous of Louise. You take her hand, and hold it for the rest of the movie, and you don’t talk about it after.

Asshole
This is gross, but: the family cat, Quincy, is always licking his butt. Like, every time you look over there, and he’s curled up on the floor or even next to you on the couch, he’s going at it, and it makes you want to throw up. For a month, you can’t even bear to pet him. But then you get over it, and everything’s fine, and your mom calls you on Saturday morning in the fall of your sophomore year of college and tells you Quincy drowned in the neighbors’ pool. You cry some, but whatever. There’s a party a couple weeks later, Halloween, and the past few months have been just a really weird time so you’re excited, and you show up with friends, and you’re all dressed up like Josie And The Pussycats. Except none of you could afford driving into town to get supplies, so it’s more like an impressionistic interpretation of Josie and the Pussycats composed of items that were in your collective closets. You spend a lot of time explaining the situation to everyone until you just give up. Around midnight, a guy and a girl start taking off their clothes. Josie and the other Pussycat have left, and you’re in a corner, leaning against a wall, telling yourself you should stop drinking. You watch the guy and the girl take off their clothes. You’ve never seen this happen in person before, and at first, it’s exciting. Then the guy is completely naked and he bends over and you can see his, his, and it’s only a few feet away from where you’re standing. Something in your stomach flips, and the next thing you know you’re in the only bathroom in the place, door locked, curled up behind the toilet although you don’t feel like puking. You try and put all of this together–the depression, the dead cat, the word. But it doesn’t fit. Someone knocks on the door. “Go away,” you say. Then: “Damn!” Then: “Marmalade!” The knocking stops. You sleep where you are and wake up at four with a headache and sore neck. You sneak out of the apartment without anyone seeing you. Later, the guy and girl who took their clothes off wave at you in the library and you think: Jesus, really?

Fuck
For a really long, embarrassingly long time, you associate this word with diarrhea. You are never able to figure out why.

Cunt
For a while, you pretend you’re British. This is just after college, when everything’s kind of fucked anyway, so you and your friends hang out after work and you talk in fake accents and you call each other cunts. What’s weird is that it’s never exactly funny, really, and the whole thing is so artificial and dumb that you can only sustain it for five or ten minutes before giving up, but you keep committing to the bit. One Saturday you and your roommate are at a bookstore together, skimming the classics section and you’re trying to decide which Henry James book you’ve actually read. You see something by Hemingway, and without thinking about it, you say, “Oh look at this cunt.” Your roommate snickers, and you say, “What a cunting cunt he was,” all posh, and your roommate says something about, god, biscuits or bloomers or something. You point at a book by Fitzgerald and say, “Oh, and this one was cuntier,” and your roommate’s having trouble breathing. Then you see something by Woolf, and you say, “And here’s the cuntiest cunt of them all!” and you both crack up. When you can see clearly again, you notice two little girls over in the children’s section, staring at you. You and your roommate leave the store without saying anything, and later you wonder what kind of idiot puts the classics next to the kid’s books.

Marmalade
You don’t see Louise for years. Not for years, not even with all the social media networking that’s going around. You don’t even think of her. And then you’re back home for a weekend, visiting, and your mother says she’s going to pick up sandwiches at the store, and you say, no, you’ll pick them up, and you’re standing in line wondering if you have enough cash and hoping they’ll take a card, and someone says, “Hi?” and there she is. You find a table in the back and sit down and try and have a conversation, because the sandwiches can wait a few more minutes and this is kind of a big deal. Except, well, it isn’t. Louise is fine. Married now, with a kid, and it turns out the guy is somebody you both knew in grade school. “That’s like a Taylor Swift song,” you say, and you honestly mean it as a compliment, but it comes out like you’re trying to be witty and a little mean. Louise is fine with it, though. She asks how you’ve been. You’re okay. Nothing really to report. You ask about Melissa, and are completely unsurprised to hear she’s living in New York. And that’s when the conversation starts to die. This is your best friend. This is the only person you’ve ever called “best friend,” and you feel like it is very, very important to find some way to convey that, to convey how much you miss being in a time in your life when “best friend” was a label with actual, tangible weight. A time when language carried magic. You stammer, stall a little, and try and figure out how to explain this. All you can come up with is a memory from a decade ago, maybe more: the two of you upstairs in your bedroom with your mother and father watching Law & Order downstairs, and you were trying pot for the first time, the windows open wide, scared shitless that the smell would find a way to seep into the carpet. Neither of you are stoned, but you’re both so strung out and hyper about even trying to do this that you feel something anyway. Around three in the morning, Louise says that you ought to have a word. Something between the two of you, something that has a different meaning for everyone else, that you can use when you want to swear but there are grown-ups around who won’t let you. It’s a lame idea, but at three am it sounds like genius, and after some debate, you pick a word you read in a book for English Lit. You both use the word constantly for the next three months, until everyone else is kind of like would you just shut up with that word already. Which is part of the point. But it loses its thrill eventually. The context shifts, and once you leave home for school, there’s no real need for it anymore. For a while, you and Louise talk on the phone and e-mail, but that fades. Now, though, you have this chance. It’s like fate, really, to find her here. And if you can remember what that word was, what that silly little word was, you can say it now, and she’ll laugh, and then you’ll laugh, and that will be enough. But you can’t remember it. It’s just not there at all, and the day gets older, and finally Louise says she has to be going, and should we exchange phone numbers? You exchange phone numbers, and you think, this will turn into a number I’ll forget I have, and sometimes I’ll think about calling it, but what would I say? Louise gets up to go and you get up too, and as she steps away, you remember it. You remember the word. You nearly call out to her, but something stops you, and that something is the understanding that words have power, but power doesn’t last. What if you said it, and Louise didn’t understand, and then you had to explain yourself, and she’d do this forced chuckle and say wow we were crazy back then, and you’d say we sure were, and that would be awful. So you keep your mouth shut, and Louise leaves, and you get your sandwiches. You tell your mother about it, and she hugs you, even if you didn’t tell her everything. A few weeks later after midnight, you can’t sleep, so you get your phone out, and you text Louise. One word. Then you turn your phone off and lay still for a while, watching the moonlight play tricks on the ceiling.