What happens when there are too many ways to say "I love you."

It was a mistake, a gaffe, an error, plummeting in on Merriam that day. When she looked at me with those big brown organs of vision, I felt myself omit a cardio pulsation.

"Well, well, if it isn't Mr. Thesaurus, Peter Roget," she said. "Look what the Felis silvestris catus just imported."

Merriam had a way with units of language.

"I've come to talk, speak, communicate, converse, correspond," I said.

"Peter," she interrupted, "I don't have time to masticate the obesity. Excrete, or remove yourself from the cookery."

"Very well. I won't thrash around the foliage. I apologize if I urinated you off.

I've come to request your unclenched fist in holy matrimony."

Her mandible plunged and her occuli hydrated.

"Peter, I'm sorry," she said. "But you're a global cycle late and a Federal Reserve note short. We're through."

"Through? Do you mean, as in, done, completed, and defunct? Or through as in via or by means of?"

"Peter, we're ceased. I'm tired of beating my head against a permanent partition of oven-baked blocks. For a long time now, we've been like two floating vessels passing in the regular period of darkness between sunset and sunrise."