The Silence Between Languages
In the wordless country between his two tongues, the poet finds not a grave but a threshold
Between the two languages there lies a country with no name and no visible border.
It is the silence that opens in the half-second before I choose which tongue to speak.
In that pause I belong to neither, and for years the not-belonging felt like a small death.
To stand between languages is to stand nowhere, footless, on the narrow of a closing door.
It is not the homeland, whose words have grown faint; nor the new land, whose words stay cold.
It is not speech, and it is not muteness; it is the trembling that divides them.
At first I fled this silence, filling it frantically with whichever words arrived first, however wrong.
Any language, I felt, was better than the of having no language at all.
But the silence followed me, patient, into every room, and would not be argued away.
So one night, exhausted, I stopped resisting and simply stood inside it, listening, expecting nothing.
It was not empty, as I had feared; it was merely , like a field before snow.
In that quiet I heard neither my mother tongue nor my adopted one, but something older than both.
It was the wordless place from which all languages rise and to which, one day, they return.
Meaning, I understood, does not live in words; it passes through them, as light passes through glass.
And here, between the glasses, the light itself lay bare, uncoloured by any grammar at all.
The gap I had mourned as absence began, slowly, to feel like a rather than a grave.
It was not a wall between two houses but a doorway, and doorways, after all, are made for passing through.
To be is not to be nothing; it is to be , unfinished, and therefore still free.
The silence asked nothing of me: no accent to correct, no fidelity to keep, no border to cross.
In it I was neither foreigner nor native, neither young poet nor old exile, but simply awake.
I began to visit that silence as one visits the sea, to remember the of things.
What had felt like homelessness revealed itself as the widest, least room I had ever entered.
Nothing had been written there yet, and so anything, at last, might still be written.
The is not the lost; the not-yet-said is not the same as the never-again.
I stopped asking which language I belonged to and asked instead what wished to be spoken through me.
The question changed everything, turning my exile from a sentence served into a approached.
And in the deep quiet between my two tongues, I felt something gathering, patient and unnamed.
It had not yet found its words, but it was there, breathing, waiting for me to begin.