The Hounding Word
This is not fiction.
I aim to write about my real life experience with a hounding word. What is a hounding word anyway? In plain speak it is a word that haunts you for the rest of your life after the first moment of your encounter. You could meet the hounding word anywhere. From that new novel you've been planning to read, a poem you saw at a Hallmark greeting card, maybe even from everyday objects as common as a cereal box.
I met my hounding word when I was a child. It was a period in my life when most of my free time was spent perusing the cases in the Nancy Drew files and reading about gossips in Sweet Valley High. Ironically, it wasn't Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley that gave me my hounding word. It was a magazine article, the title of which I can barely remember now.
Oxymoron. That was my word. And it kept hounding me from then on in almost every reading material I ever had the privilege to lay my eyes on.
Like the vocabulary buff I was, I immediately looked up what Oxymoron meant. My mother's Merriam-Webster dictionary gave me this definition: a combination of words that have opposite or very different meaning; such as deafening silence, as an example. It was then that I realized, the word has been hounding me even before I ever knew it existed. It was in every book I read, every poem I memorized and every essay I was made to write.
It has been hiding in plain sight. From the moment I became completely aware of its true self, it became more aggressive in showing its true color to me. I could not escape. And so instead, I embraced my hounding word. My oxymoron.
Have you met your hounding word? If you haven't you're probably not reading enough.
