Lakelore

by Anna-Marie McLemore

We all have warehouses where our brains store words. People who read without dyslexia—and what puto decided a reading learning disability should have that spelling?—they have one really big warehouse, and everything about words gets stored in there. How words are spelled. How they sound. How to read them in your head and out loud. But for me, it’s like I have two totally separate warehouses. One for how words sound, how I hear them and say them. Then another one for how words look on the page, how they’re spelled, how I read them. And for every word I know, those two warehouses each have a different item number for it. Take the word platinum. I hear that word, and the first warehouse, the hearing/speaking warehouse, goes and gets that word and all the information it knows about it. I know how to say that word out loud. I know how it sounds. I know what it means. When I hear it, it calls up the cold sheen of an expensive ring, or Marilyn Monroe’s hair.