The place where words go to die is a world of perpetual autumn. It is a world where October winds blow, and the novels and magazines begin to shed their crispy dying words upon the ground. There they are raked up by the connoisseurs who are ready to hear the crunch they make when stepped upon with a leather boot. The piles of words that were once green and bright are swept unceremoniously under the tree they fell from. The patterns blend together, each vein of each leaf, each syllable and vowel and consonant, become one. I zip up my fleece coat and prepare to pounce. When I fall, the words envelop me and I break their consistency. They giggle and whisper around me, and the sky glows orange through their skin. They know so much, they have seen even more, but they will crumble now. Perhaps they will reappear in print again when the robin sings.

The place where words go to die is an abandoned candy factory. The building itself is gray and dreary, but I know better. I open up the cover and I turn the first page. There are dusty boxes filled with bright colored gummies and sour suckers. I pull open one box and I swallow whole the words ameliorate and apoplectic. They taste like taffy, I can stretch and pull the consonants out between my teeth. One is sweet and one is tangy, and I chew and I chew and I chew. Fey is baby-blanket blue and airy like cotton candy, sugar-spun and tingling my throat. Gumption is covered in sprinkles and filled with sticky caramel that glues my molars together. Soliloquy is the syrup that covers the sundae. I gorge myself on words I’ve never heard before. The words, too, are greedy. They long for the lips and tongue and teeth to savor them again, they salivate for saliva and vocal chords to turn them into something more than just black type on a page.

The place where words go to die is an orphanage on the tumble-down side of town. Little words were once nestled in paragraphs, sleeping softly and never worrying about the world dismissing them as obsolete. But they were plucked out from their down quilts, extracted from their sentences, and dropped in the rickety orphanage. They sometimes wake up to the sound of thunder and the bright streaks of lightning and they begin to cry, because they remember that once upon a time, they meant something to the world. They used to bring sentiments and pangs and twangs to the heartstrings, and they can’t help but shiver and wonder why they can’t do that anymore.

The place where words go to die is a quiet cemetery at twilight. It is a place where the ghosts will only come if you sit very, very still. The sky is dark blue like a river and speckled with stars like little silver fish swimming up the stream. I rest my back against a tree that looks like a claw and I open my blank book before the headstones. There is a breeze that rustles my hair as the words crawl from beneath the dirt and moan as they drop on to the page. They are covered in tattered clothing and flowers bloom from between their ribs. The cemetery is still quiet, but the earth is turned over and there is now a symphony booming inside my head. The ghosts tell me all their stories and I listen, knowing that I can’t bring them back to life but that I can try to justify the lives they once lived, anyways.

The place where words go to die may feel like a black hole, but it is also the birth of a star.