An Ode to Learning Language

It is your first second language.

It’s the thick and luscious r that brought you here. Or maybe it is the curve of your lower lip resonating the o with more roundness than your native tongue. It’s that click of the tongue that sent curiosity sharp down your spine; it’s that sighed h that echoed in your ears after the class was closed.

There are a multitude of reasons why this language is the one. Although maybe there is a singular motivation, an intuitive hunch, a guided path of syllables dropped like breadcrumbs to lead you to this specific classroom.

Again illiterate, again facing the unknown, you listen to the soft edges of the alphabet, to the characters. Anticipation lingers in each pause your teacher emits, like a scene skipping just before the climax of a film.

This code represents everything you are and everything you will become. Without a doubt it contains your essence, somewhere stuck in the syntax of every sentence. No longer empty with the absence of life, this new language fills you from your mouth to your feet.

Every new word gives you satisfaction, more perhaps than any other achievement -- every natural pause and pace, your hands gesturing or not gesturing in a way different than that of your childhood. You have chosen these phrases.

A year passes, fattened and plump with nouns and adjectives and verbs and verb forms and cases and gender and everything you did not know one language could contain. After a year, that tranquil a or i drips from your lips like melted snow.

But you’ve noticed something.

As you grow, so does that absence. No matter how many rules you amass into a stockpile of grammar that matters, that hunger grows too.

At first it is frightening. Four walls enclose your words. No matter how fast you learn vocabulary, how accurate you match the endings with the function, this inescapable void only increases. Suddenly that o no longer defines the fullness of your heart, the openness of your mind.

So you take another friend, another self. The grammar is familiar, but only faintly; the words are jumbled codes of the last. This one is a puzzle. It is complex. You have not forgotten your second self, but this one is you.

These new sounds invigorate your spirit, give new names to the sun, but it is still the same sun that rises and sets without fail. These sounds dull, too.

But this time there is an expectance for that sound to flatten like a shadow on the street. Six months in and the growing pains begin. They grind your sentences into ashen whispers, but only for a few weeks. With this language, this phase was shorter. You already knew the illness; the remedies were in your pocket.

There is now in this new language an acceptance of that creeping vortex. The hunger disappears, but the heart returns.

For you all things are laid bare and open. For you to skim, for you to hum, for you to dig deep into the trenches of another soul – one that is not yours, but has become part of yours all the same.