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You collect words and keep them in a jar on your bedside table. Like loose change, you sew them into the lining of your brother's beat-up leather jacket. You watch them settle like dust on windowsills, bathtubs, old clothes, dry tongues. You pocket every phrase, every idiom, every metaphor, every goodbye. You allow them to coil like vines around your ribcage and escape from the gaps between your teeth. You feel silk but taste blood.
You are always in between languages. You think in one and feel in another. Sometimes, the sentences bleed into each other and you drown in your stream of consciousness. You savor this, because it is the only way you can remember your brothers, the butterflies, the long, dusty days filled with music and laughter. God, you would trade your thousand tongues just to hear the sound of laughter again. Your adoptive father tells you to stick to one tongue, dammit, or I swear to god, I will cut yours. You hear but never listen.
wabi-sabi: finding beauty in the imperfect and the incomplete
You grew up in a rural town that was placed only on the map during music festival season. Your brothers hated the tourists - "they are whiter and more lifeless", they said - and terribly wanted to get out of there. They planned to join the military or the police or something - something powerful and different and good. Your father stopped playing his guitar, looked at them dead in the eye, and said, "the police, the military, special forces, they only hunt down boys who look like you. Black sheep to a slaughter."
So when they came, like waves over jagged rocks, the rest of the world was content with surrendering you and your people to Atlantis. CNN spent half a minute, then switched to the Joffrey-Sansa scandal. They came, with teeth as sharp as basilisks', and stole the music from windpipes and the breath from lungs. They spirited you away, along with your brothers, because they said your parents owed them big money - money you didn't have and probably never will. Your parents did not struggle. Your dad strummed a final chorus and off you went, with only your dictionary and a set of pens and notebooks. You were ten. They brought you to an old city, and there was a woman with a bat's wings and an eagle's legs and a scorpion's tail. It was a very special city, they said, where you would meet your new mummy and daddy. Your brothers bristled, and bruised their knuckles every chance they got. You didn't want a new mummy and daddy, you cried, you just wanted to go home. The men looked at you with surprise: you spoke to them in their language. You didn't know. Perhaps the brick dust you inhaled got stuck in your throat.
Your new father was fat and had a long red beard. He had a triangular house. The men told you he was a good master. You asked, but is he a good daddy? Maybe he was, because he paid the bad men so much money - you never thought you were worth that much. Your new father trained young boys to become guards and soldiers, and he said your brothers were perfect. You weren't strong like them, and worse, you were a girl. But he said that you would have a special role.
"You have many tongues, girl," he said, "Put them all to use and speak for me.”
You bowed your head. For all the languages you eventually spoke, you used none to speak for yourself.
ya’aburnee: "you bury me", to wish to die before another person, love that is morbid and magical
Your brothers soon become strangers, and you have no words to spare for them. Your adoptive father growls at you to stop looking at the merchandise. You remember a rhyme you made once to ensnare customers: if you can't pay, then look away! You forget that your brothers are hired soldiers now - these things seem to only happen in headlines.
One day, you would find the words to lift the spell. You just have not yet found the right language yet. At dusk, when the air is cooler and your father's spirits lighter, you read your notebooks and feel as if you're talking to a ghost. How many of your lives have died in the past few years. But at least you can speak more than six languages now. There are more words now. More emotions. More ashes. Most you learned on your own. Some you only speak in your dreams.
You draw maps inside your head. You practice speaking to guards, train conductors, officers, teachers, strangers, lovers, God. You silently pack your few belongings and say "I long" in eighteen languages. You try to spot your brothers in the crowd of sad, empty men. You can no longer recognize them. You cry wordlessly and pray for a language that can translate the abyss growing inside you. Nothing answers. No one is there.
saudade: reaching out for something you have loved and lost, a burning longing
Your brother gives you his leather jacket. The two others are asleep, he says, they're young and tired and their bones creak and their hearts ache. Remember us and remember the butterflies and remember home, he tells you. One day, we'll see you in the world, he holds your hand, one day, we'll meet again. For a moment, you forget the word "doubt."
mångata: the reflection of moonlight on water
You are here. You are here and the world is speaking to you in all its beautiful languages. You are here, where smoke rises up to the skyline, where the sun is brighter, where for once, conversation is between two people. There are so many new words to collect, new idioms to borrow, new metaphors to learn. Still, you always look behind your shoulder, fearing that your adoptive father has stolen your shadow. Visions of your brothers, dead because of some sad, pathetic war, linger behind your eyelids. Your parents, your home, the old stories you buried in your heart, they all rise and rise and rise to consume you. You are afraid that you are haunting your own dorm room.
You do whatever it takes to pay the bills (and silence the ghosts). So you think. You think in different languages. English. French. Latin. Greek. The ancient tongues of your father and his colleagues. You write in your notebooks, on your skin, on the back alley near your room, on paper napkins, on the underside of tables, on the roads with chalk: "YOU ARE HERE." When the words fail, you wave your white flag in surrender.