Loving in My 2nd Language

When I told my psychotherapist that when on Tinder, I was only swiping right on the guys who couldn’t speak my mother-tongue, he suggested that I was afraid of intimacy. Intimacy – this dark and dank castle that was protected by a wounded dragon. What he got right about me remains to be processed on my own, but what he wasn’t getting was the fact that you can not seek intimacy when you do not exist and when I left my homeland, I ceased to exist.

Carefully packaged, preserved, and transported through customs – just like other exotic-wanna-be oriental goods – lubed with tears and bravery, I was delivered like a premature wet baby, frowning at the gibberish labels thrown at me from all around. There is fight, flight, or freeze, they say; and there was forfeit, defeat, and “what the fuck did I just do with my life” for me.

I adore the advances in technology and yet, I get nostalgic thinking about the times we were deprived of it. When a power outage was an adventure for my little brother and I, enabling us to play with the candles that my mom would light around the house. We would be birds with our hands, we would be butterflies, and we would be rabbits jumping around the walls.

A beautiful shadow on the wall – that’s how it felt like when I started to be in another language. Oh, how I tried to make the perfect shadows with my hands; to be poetic, humorous, smart, cultured and respectful, only to realize that my butterflies would never fly high enough to follow me over the walls of this language barrier.

Acceptance – Have you ever said it out loud to yourself? It’s almost magical how it can silence a whole congress of dissonant parts of your personality shouting out to get a bigger share of your life.

I climbed the highs of love in my mother-tongue, and I got both his heart and mine properly shattered, as painfully as possible. Who would want to do the same thing again in the same language? Laughing the same laughs and crying the same tears when even the simplest recipes don’t taste the same when you’re not there.

It’s now time for me to stop smuggling the shadows of old times into my new life. It’s now time for me to arrive as some “thing” totally new.

So I dare to live. In my second language.
I dare to write in my second language.
As the poet says:

Everybody wants to be a cat.
Because a cat’s the only cat
Who knows where it’s at.
Oh, yeah. *

* “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” from “The Aristocats-1970”