Imagining: What If Words Could Leave Their Pages

I open a book and close my eyes. I imagine that the words lift from the pages and float up into the air. Black type no longer imprinted onto their numbered pages, bound inside a cover, secured to the name of their author. They rise and swirl around me, free as they once were: before they entered someone's head and were pinned to a page by someone's hand. I catch glimpses of sentences, of phrases, just like if I were to open the book at random, jab my finger at a single line and read. The words are beautiful, plain, strange, mysterious, intriguing and illusive. A sentence trails off and I turn, trying to follow it, trying to discover where it is going. When the words first broke away from their pages they ascended slowly, lazily. Now they are moving faster and faster, swirling, catching me in the middle of a mad cyclone. The words are like puzzle pieces that I wish to put together. One handful of scattered words is not enough. What is their meaning, their purpose, their origin, their destination? I am turning, spinning, reading and reaching, trying to catch them.
"Wait, come back, slow down."

The words move faster until there are no more sentences. Just single verbs and adjectives, with meaningless exclamation points and commas thrown in. Will they behave like a phoenix? Is this a sort of death - an escape from the book that housed them, going down in a firey demise before rising again, restored to some new glory?

Then, the words answer me. A low murmur of narration.
"Chapter one," "Then he said," "So it was," Nevertheless,", "Epilogue."

The murmur of words and phrases grows. It rises like the tide, stronger and louder until I have to cover my ears. Then it dies down, and as it does, the swirling slows. A transition takes place. The words change from a hectic cyclone to something resembling snow. Softly, gently, they fall, obliging in an unremarked way to gravity's insistent pull. Some fall to the ground and some stick to me. They land on my arms, my nose, my feet. They cling to my hair and my clothes. I raise my hand and look at the disjointed, scattered words.

Lovely, then, perilous, glass, tremble, bird, hold, an, milestones, seven, Emily, earnest, breathtaking, blue, substantial, tree, less, penny, us, be.

I'm reminded of those little white magnetic strips that have words printed on them and are supposed to be arranged into poems or thoughts on a magnetic easel. I'm like a human easel, covered in a smattering of words and punctuation marks. I turn my hand over and the words on the top fall away, drifting to the ground. I shake my arms and they fly off. I shake my hair, my legs, all of me, until every word has fallen to the ground and is lying in odd, dark drifts around my feet. I reach for the book they came from. Every word, even the title and the dedication inside the cover, is gone, having joined the strange exodus away from their home. Poor book. So empty. Yet also so inviting, for anyone who feels compelled to write.

I kneel down and scoop up a handful of words. I sprinkle them over the empty pages. To my surprise, a few land and stick. I turn the book over so that the pages are facing downwards at the piles of words, and suddenly they begin to rise a second time, re-affixing themselves to the pages. There's a magnetic force that draws the words upwards, a force beyond their control. The book is reclaiming them. The phoenix is rising from the ashes.

When the last word and the last period has returned to its place on the last page, I close the book. The volume rests in my hands. The contents had taken me up, turned me around, and finally come to an end, bringing me back to where I had started. The murmuring narration hummed faintly still in my ears:

"Pondering", "However", "With hope", "She climbed," "They sang", "Thought-provoking", "So at last" ...