Languor

Word of the Day Monday, March 08, 2010

languor

\LANG-guhr; LANG-uhr\ , noun;

1. Mental or physical weariness or fatigue.
2. Listless indolence, especially the indolence of one who is satiated by a life of luxury or pleasure.
3. A heaviness or oppressive stillness of the air.


He couldn't get over how this place seemed to embody the most extreme contradictions.

The desperate poverty in a land so abundantly endowed with natural resources. The dry, sun scorched plains stretching as far as the eye could see in one brown monotonous stretch, offset by the most vivid sun rises and sunsets of his life; colors only imagined on God's palette. The slow, languorous smiles that broke like gentle waves across the faces of the local town folk as they gathered and told stories. The same smiles that were shattered against the backdrop of the most achingly inhuman suffering he had ever witnessed.

Yet, the whole place was teeming with life, like a coiled spring waiting to be unleashed. He had never felt so alive, as if the atoms that he was made up of were vibrating at a different frequency since he had stepped off of that airplane.

Maybe it was better that she hadn't come with him. He had been crushingly disappointed, but he already felt like a different person from the guy who had brushed tears away as he made his way through security. His growth was just like the life all around him, unlimited potential waiting to be unleashed. Would all that even have been possible with a part of his past there to remind him of who he was destroying in his metamorphosis? He wasn't sure.

He rolled the acorn between his thumb and finger inside his pocket and thought the African sky was the most perfect giant canvas he'd ever seen.