At home, I play with words – fetishize them, even. My friends and I mentally high-five when one of us uses a particularly apt word, and we smile inwardly or shadow box or softly correct when one of us mucks it up. We take words seriously, both as means to expression and as ends in of themselves.
Here, though, I don’t have that luxury. Here, words are means, the thing standing between me and being able to say what I want to say. They’re knots on a rope, and I’m climbing (or falling) so fast that I don’t have time to think about the rope’s texture or weave or heft. I need the next word, and as soon as I have it, I hurl it outward. You know those old cartoons in which the bridge is crumbling, nipping at Wile E. Coyote’s heels as he flees for safety? It’s that in reverse – I’m throwing up trusses with whatever’s at hand, trying not to outrun the words that are keeping me suspended.
It’s hard. At home, I like to get at my thoughts from a couple different angles, throwing salt down on the roads to ease my approach. I take my time – and stretch the patience of my interlocutors, I think – looping around the cul-de-sac for another go, and then another. I’ll use three different adjectives when one would do. Here, I’m lucky if I can find one that kind of works.
This has been good for me. Because I don’t have the vocab or the verbal facility to say what I want as fast as I want to, I can’t control conversations the way I can at home. I end up having to follow others more, to respond to whatever turns their brain happen to make. To observe them and their words, and to let myself feel whatever I feel and think about it means.
I’m not sure I’d have ever chosen to handicap myself in this way, but I’m glad it’s happened. I don’t have the option to play to my strengths. And that means that I can’t indulge the compulsion to constantly do so – to talk and talk endlessly out of pride at being good at it. Learning Spanish means learning to shut the hell up.
