Words That Taste of Absence
Fluent on the surface, the poet cannot reach the emotional depths of his new language
In the new language I could buy bread, thank the clerk, and politely upon the weather.
The words worked; they opened doors, paid bills, and carried me smoothly through the ordinary day.
Yet each of them tasted faintly of , as though borrowed from a stranger's cold kitchen.
I lived inside this language the way one lives in a rented house, furnished by someone else.
Everything functioned, and nothing belonged to me, not the chairs, not the walls, not the words.
On the surface my sentences were correct, fluent, even admired for their careful and old-fashioned grace.
But beneath that smooth surface lay a depth the new words could not be persuaded to reach.
When I said "grief," the sound stayed on my lips and never travelled down into the wound.
In my mother tongue that same word had a weight, a temperature, a smell of wet earth.
Here the word for sorrow was clean and , a photograph of bread that no one could eat.
I could describe my feelings accurately, and yet the description felt like translating a fire into arithmetic.
The surface of me spoke; the depth of me stood silent, waiting for a language that never came.
I began to notice that and are two entirely different countries, rarely sharing a border.
A man may speak a language perfectly and still be a mute in the chambers of his heart.
Colours drained from the words: "sea," "mother," "home" arrived grey, flattened, stripped of their old light.
I tasted absence in every sentence, the particular flavour of a room from which the furniture is gone.
My accent improved, my vocabulary swelled, and the distance to my own emotions grew quietly wider.
People praised my progress, not knowing they were admiring the polished shell of a thing.
At dinner I could joke, agree, and disagree, performing the of a self I did not feel.
Afterwards, alone, I would search for a single word that fit the exact shape of my .
The new language offered me a hundred near-misses, each close enough to wound and too far to comfort.
Meaning, I learned, is not information; it is the that a word has gathered over a lifetime.
My new words had gathered nothing yet; they were cold coins, freshly minted, spent without memory.
I wondered whether feeling itself could survive so long in a tongue that could not hold it.
Perhaps the heart, denied its native words, simply falls silent, like a bird in a foreign winter.
I did not want to become fluent and empty, a translator of my own vanishing interior.
So I hunted, night after night, for the seam where surface might at last sink into depth.
And when I wanted to weep, I found no word here shaped precisely like my particular grief.