I met Jill around the time we were protesting language. We weren’t doing this in so many words but animalistic grunts and shadows we’d create with our hands. I remember we weren’t supposed to call our new communication styles animalistic because that was exactly what the vegan enterprise was protesting. 

But the reality was that this movement started entirely separate from the vegan enterprise movement. By the sixties, everybody was communicating with everyone about everything. We had been raised by parents who wanted to communicate every detail on every platform and then communicate about that communication. By the time we got to college we were exhausted by syllables. Words were coming out like scripts. We didn’t know how to say, anymore, what we were feeling. We became scared of secondary sources, and I think there was a fear that maybe we had lost the ability to know what we were feeling, raw. When a Rutgers University student received a fortune cookie with a blank piece of paper it occurred to him, and then to campuses across the country, that it was our generation’s duty to reset language.  

There were many factions of the movement: those who wore the mouthguards, those who wore no mouthguards but spoke little, those who restricted to trisyllabic words, and those who didn’t participate at all. The impartial were indeed looked down upon as “sheep,” which was funny because one of the practices of the movement was to bleat when people spoke in trisyllabic or longer words. Ironically, the people protesting most ardently were the humanities students, whose departments were affected the most. Their seminars became infested with bleats of all kinds, and professors eventually adapted to introducing themselves as “teach” at the start of semesters.  

I was somewhere between the non-speakers and the trisyllabers, mainly for social reasons. I had come to college to study rocks, and I didn’t want to be ostracized further. But I was obsessed, specifically with the volcanoes on Hawaii, where my parents had taken me when I was ten. We never travelled because they are massive xenophobes, to the extent that they would not want to be a foreigner in another country because they would empathize too deeply with the other side. So everything about Hawaii was thrilling: the fact that we couldn’t bring fruit into it, that it had black sand and active volcanoes. The following winter, I begged my parents to take us to Hawaii again, but they had been so scarred by the intense “beach culture” that for the rest of my teens they refused. To this day I don’t know if I want to be a seismologist out of rebellion or love for the sand. I suppose it is always a bit of both. 

Jill also had a traditional upbringing, more so than me. Her parents were xenophobes and flat-earthers, although I got the sense that they didn’t know to call themselves that. She never told me much about them, just that they were afraid of borders and tropical fruits, and that they feared the ocean because it would end. She told me how outraged they when she asked to go to the beach once—had she not thought about the risk of falling off, did she think her life such a trivial thing? I was desperate to know her, so I made conclusions: that the ocean to her was what Hawaii was to me, that she grew up with a lack of language that made her immune to the movement.

But before I knew any of this, she was the girl who would stay long after class studying transform plate boundaries while I pored over basaltic rock samples. As she leaned over the seismometer (which we called the quaking-station at the time), her shoulder-length hair would cover her cheekbones a little bit and she looked so pretty, her nose so pointy, and her neck, strained, so gentle. We were alone those afternoons, often even the lab instructors had left, but we did not talk. The movement had eliminated the notion of small talk, and I did not know where she stood—that is, whether a “hello” would offend her and ruin my chances. But one afternoon, when Jill started to leave early and I fought an instinct to stop her, I realized I had been staying late to study her face and not my rock samples. 

So I ran after her. I tapped her on the shoulder and when she turned to face me, I noticed that her eyes were blue and I lost every word I had. My heart squeezed. When she tells this story, she will tell you that I started breathing really hard and moaned. The version I would like to tell is that I literally did not have any words, that I did not know if speaking to her would be offensive, so I gave what I thought was a pleading wail. Maybe a grunt, but certainly not a moan. 

She laughed, and said, “Oh, you’re a part of this?” 

“NO, no,” I said, relieved in so many ways. She laughed. “NO, I’m not–”

“Don’t switch sides for me,” she cackled. 

“No, I didn’t want to offend you I don’t believe in this–” 

“Then why do it at all?” 

I fell in love with her right then and there. When she started walking I started walking. When she stopped and I stopped to ask her out.  

“Why’d you stop?” she asked. 

“Because you did,” I responded.

“Baaaaah,” she bleated. I asked her out nonetheless. 

Our first date was at the burger restaurant a mile from campus. It was their last week before going out of business, concurrent vegan enterprise movement and all. As we cut across campus, we walked in silence, and I felt the feelings of like gurgling inside of me. I had forgotten how to say them, and the more I thought, the more I forgot all the words I knew. It was fall, and that saved me; a leaf fell in my hand, and I gave it to her. She mocked an expression of confusion, then held the leaf up, and with this adorable look of shock and tone of a kindergarten teacher, exclaimed, “leaf!” We cackled, and that was that. 

We were shy with each other. As the movement intensified, we did our speaking in private. “We’re moving in counterclockwise,” Jill said to me once, and she was right. In an absence of words people had resorted to exchanging lewd glances to one another to sleep with them. People learned to sleep with people first, then speak. Intimacy had been inverted. 

We went a year without sleeping with one another. The act of speaking was already intimate enough. But in our senior spring, the movement waned–professors started reintroducing -isms and -tions, and by the time we graduated, we had recalibrated to exactly where we were. Papers became hard again, classes less animalistic. And Jill and I had sex for the first time. Having lost the intimacy of speaking, we lost our own closeness and were trying to salvage things. It didn’t work, it was silent, and we lost our words altogether. We never recovered from this silence. When we did speak, it was more painful than nothing at all because I realized that our closeness was circumstantial. And I think she realized it too. What I wish I had realized, though, was that speaking with Jill throughout the language protest was the closest I would feel with anybody in my life.