Sponge

I lay in my room the other night, waiting patiently for Sleep to come and lay with me. My mind does funny things when i give it free reign to go skipping in whatever direction it chooses, and that night, it made nonsense of the English language.

Sponge. Sponge, i thought. Spun-j.

"Sponge," i whispered out loud.

I rolled it around in my brain. Around the twists and turns, down into my mouth. I poked at it with my tongue, tasting it and feeling the texture of it against my palate. Sponge. I opened my mouth and released it in a soap bubble and let it pop. Sponge. It rained back down on my face, seeped into my pores and bored its way back into my mind.

Sponge.

It stopped sounding like a real word. It felt wrong in my mouth; the shape was amorphous, the consonants didn't match, and the j-sound was positively obscene, because it was the end-sound, but not the end-letter. The e at the end was like a third nipple: freakish and unuseful. I averted my mind's eye from it.

Spongespongspongesponge.

I couldn't anchor it to its definition anymore, or even to a picture of it. It was disconnected, floating around in the ether, an amnesiac word that lost its meaning in a freak collision with my uncomprehending intellect. I worried at its purpose with my restless thoughts, and unraveled it, slowly and methodically, like a poorly knitted afghan.

Sponge.

I reduced it to gibberish. Mere linguistic ruins.

I was concerned about the destruction i wreaked on that word. Could i empty any word? All words? Could i unmake language as easily as it was created? By being too mindful, i think i could. I could dissect them into alphabet soup and swallow them, with comprehension broth, and fathom no more.