Words Without a Body
A language with no 'I' and no 'you'
As the exchanges continued, one strange in the language kept widening.
The aliens never used a symbol that stood for a single, separate self.
Their messages spoke of thought and feeling, yet named no thinker.
If there were no self, Mara wondered, how would anyone even speak?
Every human sentence leaned on the quiet pillars of I and you.
Take those two words away, and most of grammar simply collapses into silence.
While humans thought as islands, the Keplerians seemed to think as one wide sea.
Their word for we had no smaller pieces hidden inside it at all.
If she were a single voice among them, she would have no name to give.
The idea both fascinated and unsettled her long into the sleepless nights.
What, she asked, would love even mean to a mind that was never alone?
While one human grieves a loss, perhaps their whole species feels it together.
If there were no between minds, secrets and lies might not exist.
Mara tried to translate their greeting and found no honest place for you.
She began inventing new symbols that pointed at the group rather than the person.
While her language pulled things apart, theirs seemed to fold everything into one.
If she spoke to them as individuals, she might be misreading every line.
Each translation felt like forcing a river into the shape of separate cups.
Were their thoughts truly shared, she asked, or merely written without pronouns?
If minds could join, then would be a purely human invention.
She realized that grammar itself carried a hidden picture of what a person was.
While humans built walls of self, the Keplerians had perhaps never raised any.
To translate them well, she would first have to her own .
If there were no I, she thought, then perhaps there was no fear of death.
That single missing word reshaped everything she believed about meaning and mind.
And still the patient signal waited, offering thoughts that belonged to no one alone.