How long can you live in isolation from yourself?

A love letter to our past selves

Your Playbill For This Evening’s Performance 

Fifty-eight days ago, one line of dialogue in a play made me cry. 

The play, called English, is set in a classroom in Iran where four students gather to study for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). English was written by a playwright named Sanaz Toossi, and it debuted at the Linda Gross Theater in New York in 2022. English received positive reviews in several publications, including The New Yorker and New York Times, but I had not heard of the play until my partner suggested we see a staging of it in Washington, D.C., where we live. 

I’m not a theater critic, so I don’t have anything to say about the technical aspects of English. But I do have something to say about the play. What I have to say is personal, yet shared. If it isn’t universal, then it is close enough that I believe my something will make you feel something. My something is about my mom’s unexplained illness, my obsession with language, and my journey to understand the world. 

English made me feel something by pulling back my internal armor, revealing how I am atomizing myself, soothing the freshly exposed self, and, ultimately, making me feel whole. 

It did all this simply by asking: 

How long can you live in isolation from yourself?

I've embedded audio loops recorded over the years to play between sections. This first one, New Recording 31, is from March 3, 2018. In my note it is simply labeled ominous.

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Act I 

As a child, I imbibed the English language like manna. 

I’m not sure when I started to talk, but I do know that, riding in the car in a light rain, I once asked my granny if she was going to change her windshield wipers to intermittent. She didn’t know what the word meant, so I defined it for her. I was two years old. At eight, I won my elementary school’s Accelerated Reader challenge by reading every single book in the school library. When I was in the tenth grade, I memorized the entire first fragment of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I suppose this is technically Middle English, but almost 20 years later I still remember large swaths of it.

The English language brought me joy and comfort, but in retrospect it also served a nefarious purpose. You see, English was a weapon I used to cleave myself in two, excising a part of me that I simply could not look directly in the eye–my mother’s unexplained illness and my inability to communicate clearly with her in English. 

My mom is a native Spanish speaker. She was born in Cuba, but spent her childhood shuttling between Puerto Rico, the United States, and Spain. While I would find this constant movement unnerving, my mom thrived in the chaos.    

My childhood was the opposite. I was born and raised in a small city, where my great-grandparents had settled after immigrating from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe. I was born in the same hospital as my grandma, spent many hours running around the house where my dad was raised, and I met most of my best friends in elementary or middle school. 

At home, our family only spoke in English, but when I was two, my maternal grandparents moved from Puerto Rico to a town 45 minutes away from us. I absorbed the flavor of Spanish in their house, but mostly in a childlike fashion. Outside of asking for croquetas or empanadas, Spanish didn’t really seem relevant. 

Until my mom got sick. 

The full details of that story are too vast for this essay, yet intertwined in each word. Here’s the very short version: an unknown virus attacked my mom’s brain when she was 34. The mystery virus caused lesions on her brain, leading to brain surgery and the removal of much of her frontal lobe. 

I was six and couldn’t deal with this complete fabric shift in my reality. So I started to turn away from everything that I associated with my mom. 

My mom loved the beach, so I refused to go in the water. 

My mom loved cats, so I decided cats were evil gremlins. 

My mom’s native language was Spanish, so I shielded myself in a suit of English armor. 

Each action in isolation only represented a small shift away from my mom, but eventually these small shifts began to compound in invisible exponents until I couldn’t stand to share the same physical space with her. 

I thought that distancing myself from my mom would spare me emotional pain (spoiler alert: it did not). But the main reason I distanced myself from my mom was that–on a completely illogical, yet visceral level–I hoped this distance would protect me from being struck by the unexplained virus that had irrevocably changed her life. As an adolescent and young adult, I prized the life of the mind above all, and I couldn’t imagine what life would be like if I lost my most precious possession–my mind. 

Compartmentalizing came naturally to me, but even an expert compartmentalizer reaches a limit. The first cracks began to appear when I moved with some friends to an off-campus apartment during college. Two of my friends decided to adopt a pair of kittens–a girl and a boy from the same litter of tuxedo cats.

At that stage in my life, cats fit clearly in the mom bucket and so I really wanted nothing to do with these little gremlins. But the gremlins were really cute. 

The girl, Patti, was ugly in a way so pure that it morphed from ugly to cute. Her tuxedo patterns were more thrift store than Tom Ford; her right eye was higher than the left, as if she was always asking a question; her whiskers were as untamed as an outlaw’s mustache in 1850s California. But while her appearance seemed odd and unnatural, she marshaled her body in a completely natural and effortless fashion–something I’d never seen another animal do up close. She chased a laser pointer across the living room at Usain Bolt speeds until the laser pointer reached the wall, at which point she would leap up like Vince Carter in the 2000 slam dunk contest and attack the laser like, well, like a hunting cat would attack prey, I guess. 

Patti’s brother was the opposite. His name was Felix–a classic name for a tuxedo cat straight out of central casting. His markings were pristine. It really looked like he was wearing a dinner jacket from Downton Abbey. Even as a kitten, he was not interested in exerting himself. He fit the mold of the lazy cat and soon started to pack on the pounds associated with that particular archetype. But he was very affectionate and snuggly. He was manipulating me for treats, but I suddenly didn’t mind the manipulation. 

It is both annoyingly simple and also fitting that two non-human creatures started to open me up to emotion. Unfortunately, it took a tragedy of sorts to finally open my eyes and decide I had to do everything I could to make the most of my relationship with my mom. 

The tragedy is extremely small in the grand scheme, but also still sad to me many years later. Patti, the goofy little rascal with the most zest for life of any creature I’d encountered, got an aggressive form of cancer and didn’t make it to her first birthday. She was my roommate's cat, not mine, so he handled all the hardest parts. 

But I helped him bury Patti in the backyard. 

New Recording 43, recorded March 19, 2018. In my notes it is labeled hopeful cool.

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Intermission 

The TOEFL is the villain of the play English. 

One character, an aspiring doctor named Elham, is particularly haunted by this tyrannical villain. Elham has been accepted into medical school in Australia. All she needs to matriculate is a passing score on the TOEFL. But, as she reveals midway through the play, Elham has failed the TOEFL five times already. Elham is super type A, and her attitude to studying English mirrors what seems to be her philosophy on life: any problem or challenge can be overcome with brute force. Spoiler alert: like all diligent heroes, Elham slays the Final Boss as only a hero can–flawlessly and with panache. 

Goli, a teenager with an outlook that could be characterized as either pleasantly cheery or hopelessly naive (depending on where one’s cynicism meter is currently calibrated), confronts the TOEFL with a smile. In fact, she doesn’t even see the TOEFL as a villain. English is uncomplicated to her–merely a way that much of the world conducts its business. To me, Goli seemed not very introspective or simply too young to have a complex view of language. Though probably she is just too unlike me and so I missed her subtle complexities. 

Roya is in the class not because she needs to pass the TOEFL, but because she wants to be able to communicate with her granddaughter, who is being raised as an English speaker in Canada. Roya leaves a series of halting voice messages in English for her son–who always sends her calls straight to voicemail–where she alternates between cheerfully demonstrating her progress in English and trying, unsuccessfully, to hide the need she has to be a part of her granddaughter’s life. This gap between Roya and her granddaughter flooded my body with emotions about my mom–the burning desire to be able to communicate with her, the searing pain from that unmet need, the seething anger that language, my dear friend, had been the one to inflict this pain on me. 

Elham, Goli, and Roya all struggle with the English language in obvious and understandable ways–dropping articles, incorrectly conjugating verbs, awkwardly vocalizing letters in a manner that runs afoul of their muscle memory and the rules of English pronunciation. But the fourth student in the class, Omid, pronounces English words and phrases in a calm and effortless manner. 

In a scene that made it into one of the reviews of the play I read, the class is playing a game to test their vocab. They’re given a category, in this case clothing-related words, and a ball. The ball is tossed around the class like a hot potato, and whoever catches the ball has to immediately say a word that fits the category without repeating any previously said words. Omid wins this game by busting out a word–windbreaker–that takes even the teacher, Marjan, by surprise. 

But the scene that most clearly demonstrates the fluency gap between Omid and his fellow students comes when they are all asked to listen to a recording of a conversation and repeat back what is being said. Training your ear and brain to turn vibrations in the air into ideas and concepts is, for me, more challenging than training your eyes and brain to turn the squiggles on a page into ideas and concepts–mostly because there is no margin for error when we interact with language at the speed of sound. Omid’s performance in this exercise is so effortless it is almost perfect. 

The presiding officer, so to speak, of the classroom is Marjan. Marjan speaks English with the kind of rigid propriety stereotypically associated with British English. Indeed, we learn that Marjan lived in Manchester, England for nine years, where she went by the name Mary. 

Marjan didn’t mind changing her name to Mary; in fact Marjan confesses to liking herself better in English. Roya, however, finds Marjan’s adoption of her new name to be an affront to mothers everywhere. “Our mothers get to name us,” Roya tells Marjan. The pain with which Roya delivers this line is palpable, but also a clear displacement of her emotions onto the wrong target. Sure, Roya thinks Marjan is being disrespectful, but really she is using Marjan as a vessel to lash out at her son, who won’t pick up her calls and has given Roya’s granddaughter an unpronounceable English name of her own. 

Even more than the mother-son relationship, which is undeniably powerful, the biggest thing that hit me about this scene, and Roya in general, is the way in which she attempts to bend reality to her will. 

When the class is told to bring a cassette of their favorite song in English for show and tell, Roya defiantly brings in a song called “Ashegham Man'' by an Iranian singer named Delkash. As the song plays you can tell how much it hurts Roya that her son has left her behind, that she has no meaningful connection with her granddaughter, that she must throw away all the comforts of her mother tongue if she wants to live with her son in Canada. Roya starts to lecture the class about the importance of her native language, before eventually storming out of the class. Ultimately, Roya’s refusal to budge just ends up bringing her further away from the thing that she most wants–to be with her family. 

Elham, too, tries to continually brute force reality to fit her ideal model of the world. Towards the end of the play, after Elham tells Marjan that she not only passed the TOEFL, but did so with a near perfect score, Elham delivers this bit of dialogue:

I have this amazing dream sometimes that the Persian Empire kept growing, And Cyrus the Great would still be our king. Instead of the Americans, the British, everyone telling us what to speak and how to say it, all of us would speak Farsi.

These lines encapsulate something that I struggled with for a very long time–a refusal to accept that things in the world often aren’t the way we think they should be.  

And this refusal to accept that things aren’t the way we think they should be is what really pains Elham. You see, what I think Elham really wants, more than moving to Australia to become a doctor, is to give herself permission to accept the life that makes her feel whole. Elham mastered English. She has the TOEFL scores to prove it. And with her determination, she will soon have a new life as a doctor in a new land. 

But Elham hates English. I mean look at what she said in the dialogue I quoted. She basically thinks language is about conquest and she resents the fact that, when framed this way, her language has lost the war. There is absolutely no way that she can be happy living a life in a language that has not only defeated her mother tongue, but subjugated it. What Elham wants is to feel at home with language, and what that means is staying home in the place where language makes her feel more connected to the world, not more isolated from it.   

Throughout the entire play, Marjan is the only character who refuses to speak Farsi. Even Omid, whose English comes out more fluidly than Marjan’s, slips into Farsi every now and then. Marjan refuses to speak Farsi because she wants to uphold the rules of the classroom, but, more importantly, she refuses to speak Farsi because she doesn’t want to let go of her connection to Mary. After several years living her life again in Farsi, Marjan can feel her English fraying at the edges. So, for Marjan, this small classroom is her last link to Mary–that part of her that lived life in English, that part of her that she liked better. 

In one scene, Marjan is running the class through pronunciation exercises when she accidentally pronounces a ‘v’ sound like a ‘w.’ In the split second between her mispronunciation and her self-correction, Marjan’s face contorts into a puddle of despair at this betrayal of Mary. 

And this leads me to the scene that made me write this essay.

As we move to the end of the play we find Marjan and Goli alone in the classroom. Goli asks Marjan excitedly about what it’s like to live abroad when Marjan unexpectedly slips into Farsi. With the clear-eyed hindsight of someone who spent close to a decade living life in a foreign language, Marjan tells Goli that if she decides to emigrate she must ask:

How long can you live in isolation from yourself?

Hearing this question made me look into a mirror of my past selves. 

And when I looked in that mirror I saw six-year old me sitting on the kitchen counter watching Saturday morning cartoons on a tiny cream-colored 1980s TV as my mom collapsed to the ground, seizing violently, foaming at the mouth, ripping apart my idyllic childhood. 

I saw 11-year old me heaving full-bodied sobs into my pillow on the night that I realized my mom’s brain was so damaged that, cognitively speaking, I was now more of an adult than she was. 

I saw 19-year old me burying Patti the tuxedo cat in the backyard and the decision that I made that night to try and bridge the divide between myself and my mom. 

New Recording 222, recorded on January 2, 2020. This one is otherwise unlabeled

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Act II

Learning Spanish was the obvious way to start building a bridge to my mom. After all, I’d always used language as my primary tool to make sense of the world. And the truth is that, even though I was rather pessimistic and cynical as a teenager, I hoped and believed that some version of my mom existed in her language center, locked away in a land that I would one day be able to visit. 

A study abroad program with an intensive language component seemed like the quickest way to gain fluency. So I went to my school’s website, found a list of study abroad programs in Spanish speaking countries, sorted them by price, and picked the cheapest one. 

I’d never been out of the country before going to Argentina. (I had scarcely traveled at all, save two trips I don’t even remember to see my grandparents when they lived in Puerto Rico, two trips to New York to see extended family, and one road trip with friends to see my favorite band, Phish). My dad had also never been out of the country, and so he didn’t stop me when I decided that I needed to find the two largest suitcases possible and stuff everything I owned–including a guitar–into them.

I immediately regretted bringing all my crap when I got off the plane and had to wrangle everything on my own. Combined, my luggage weighed almost as much as I did. I cut a farcical picture awkwardly pushing, pulling, and praying these massive objects around. I got briefly sad as I thought that my mom was exactly the type of person who would’ve prevented me from being in this situation by telling me to pack lightly. 

My living situation for the first four months was already sorted thanks to a host family arranged by the study abroad program. I was all set to depart for my host family’s apartment, except when I got through customs and immigration I could only find the address for the school. So I got a taxi and proceeded to make my way to the Universidad de Belgrano. 

We got on the road from the airport and my first thought was “wtf is going on with these roads.” There were lane lines, perhaps eight or ten in each direction, but the lines mostly seemed to be there to provide the curious onlooker with a visual model of the approximate size of a car. Within five minutes, my taxi driver rear-ended another driver. It was a minor bump, but instead of pulling over, as I expected, they both sort of yelled at each other, made a bunch of gestures, and sped off. 

But the thing that I found 100 times more baffling than the Argentine driving was the Argentine accent. 

I had never met anyone from Argentina before moving there, so I did not know that Argentines spoke with a famously unique accent, where Spanish sounds I thought I knew like ‘y’ and ‘ll’ suddenly seemed odd and unstable, and I had no idea that there was an entirely different second person pronoun, vos, that they used instead of tú. 

My attempts at conversation with the taxi driver fell depressingly flat. I knew I didn’t speak Spanish that well, but I felt like–thanks to my childhood exposure–I would at least be able to understand it okay. 30 minutes in that taxi made it abundantly clear how far I had to go to reach the level of fluency that I so desired. 

The taxi eventually deposited me at the entrance to the Universidad de Belgrano. I felt a sense of relief until I realized I had to lug 120 pounds of baggage around the campus looking for the office of my program. I hate asking for help, even in English, and so I wandered around in a stubborn haze of frustration for quite some time, until finally someone realized I needed help. This kind stranger led me and my stupidly large bags to the office for my study abroad program 

As soon as I opened the door to the office the woman behind the counter started laughing. 

“Sorry to laugh, your bags are just so big.” 

Wait, I thought, I actually understood all those words!

“Are you from Cuba?”

“Yes.”

“Why do the people here speak funny?”

Another laugh.

“You’ll get used to it, chichí.”

With the help of this Cuban stranger, I got the address for my host family and called another cab which took me to a four-bedroom apartment in the same leafy neighborhood as my university. The apartment belonged to a couple in their seventies named Susana and Raúl, and when I arrived I found that two other American students, Jim and Caroline, were already settled into the best rooms in the house. That left a small room that could scarcely even be called a bedroom. The room was only separated from Susana and Raúl’s bedroom by an odd contraption of narrow wooden boards that rolled up into the ceiling and back down like a garage door. It was an awkward set up, but thankfully I am a good sleeper and so I had no trouble getting to bed that night. 

On the first day of class, everyone in our program had to take a day-long test to assess our reading, writing, and speaking skills. During the speaking portion of the test, I felt a mixture of lightheadedness, nausea, and the rapid vibration of my heart, which I felt, in unison, from my chest to fingers. I suppose an easy label for this feeling is anxiety, but on that day I labeled it my “thinking of what I should say” feeling. Thinking deeply is one of the joys of being human, but thinking of what to say is an awful pit of despair–both for its insistence that there is something specific that you should say and, even more, for the way that it pulls you from the world and shoves you into your mind prison. 

If my first taxi ride was a suggestion that my Spanish skills were much worse than I thought, then my test results were a confirmation. I was placed in one of the lower level classes, for learners with little to no exposure to Spanish. It seemed that bridging the gap to my mom would take a lot more than just opening up my compartmentalized feelings.  

I walked into the first day of class with a nervous energy that was calmed significantly by a warm smile from my teacher, Natalia. I briefly introduced myself, then found a chair in the second row of tables. A few other students were already in the class, but everyone was silent, aside from a pair of very tall, very blonde, and very symmetrical guys speaking rapidly in a language I’d never heard before. Their names were Jan and Johannes and they were brothers from Sweden who were in the middle of a year-long journey around the world. They were exceptionally friendly and at the end of the semester I ended up taking a two-week sojourn to Brazil with them and a fellow classmate named Karl–an American of Scandinavian stock who could’ve passed for Jan and Johannes’ cousin. 

Our classes ran from about 9 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and my Spanish started to progress rapidly. I still spent a lot of time speaking in English with my fellow study abroad classmates, but I was also super focused in class and intent on speaking Spanish whenever possible. I tried to go out on my own and strike up conversations with strangers, but my most constant Spanish language companions during those first months were Susana and Raúl. 

Raúl looked like an aged member of the Latin American literary boom, his mostly bald pate rimmed with a shock of wild white hair. He wore very thick black glasses and meandered around the house in a tracksuit. He also loved soccer, especially his boyhood team Boca Juniors. The fact that his apartment was just a few short blocks from Boca’s eternal nemesis–River Plate–did not deter him from watching every Boca game on full blast, yelling expletives at the TV, cursing invisible ghosts of years past. 

I love soccer and so I often joined Raúl to watch games. I tried to strike up conversation during any lulls in the action. Raúl had a voluminous library and so I would formulate a basic question about literature. Nine times out of ten, Raúl would give me an angry look, gesture at the TV, and mutter a few unintelligible lines under his breath. But one time out of ten his eyes would light up as he launched into a frenzied monologue on the underappreciated genius of his favorite author, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Raúl liked to use hefty words during these discussions, and so I understood roughly half of his monologues, but I felt in my body that I was slowly coming to understand this new place and my lost self. 

My conversations with Susana were more basic. Her voice almost always seemed angry, though I think that was just a function of 50 years of smoking, which left her with a deep rasp and awful hacking cough. Susana was extremely maternal and almost every interaction between us consisted of her asking if I was hungry or giving me advice about where to go and where not to go. I was more receptive to these lectures than my other housemates, so Susana favored me from the get go. 

By the end of the first semester, my Spanish was honestly pretty good. I was way ahead of all of my classmates, and even my teacher was impressed, especially when the assessment at the end of the semester said that I should jump several levels to the second highest class available for the next semester. 

Between semesters I went on the aforementioned trip to Brazil with my three classmates–Jan, Johannes, and Karl. Brazilians of course speak Portuguese, not Spanish, though they seem resigned to people speaking bad Spanish at them in expectation of a fruitful conversation. I later learned to speak Portuguese, but when we crossed over into Brazil I knew precisely zero Portuguese words, so the four of us did the tourist thing and used Spanish plus gestures to get around. 

Jan, Johannes, Karl, and I stuck out in Brazil. The three of them–all tall, blonde, chiseled–would’ve probably stuck out on their own. But adding me–short in stature with long dark hair, a thick beard, and a slight paunch developed from drinking approximately two liters of Quilmes a day for the preceding four months–to that mix befuddled everyone we met. I did most of the group communication and I had some version of the following conversation at least five times a day.

“Hey my friend. Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“Cool. And your friends, are they American too?”

“No. They’re Swedish.”¹

“Yeah, you don’t look like them.”

Most of the time the conversations ended there, but every once in a while we’d push through that language gap and have an actual human conversation. I started to pick up a few Portuguese words and phrases here and there, and even found that, despite barely knowing how to say anything in Portuguese, I never had my “thinking of what to say” anxiety.

In Brazil, I saw that my anxiety had more to do with my own expectations and internal narratives than any objective measure of fluency. The best way I can explain this difference, I think, is with an analogy to parties.

At that point in my life, speaking Spanish was like being at a good friend’s birthday party where I know three quarters of the people. I have built a familiarity and bond with most of the partygoers, so I tend to gravitate to them and feel comfortable most of the time. 

But on that foray to find the bathroom, I run into Francisco. Do I know him? Or does he just look like someone that I sat next to in Mr. Williams’ AP European History class? 

“Hey, you in line for the bathroom?” That comes out easy enough, but then, to break the silence, I say “Man the Defenestration of Prague was pretty wild, huh,” and Francisco looks at me in a way that makes me wonder if this is just regular awkwardness or if I don’t actually know how words are supposed to work in this language after all. 

With Portuguese it was completely different, like I was at a party where I’m the one friend of a friend that no one else knows, but man is everyone sure happy to meet me.

I’m in line for the bathroom again with another dude named Francisco. 

He’s like, “Socrates taught me more about being a man than my dad and my stepdad combined,” and I’m like, “You and Plato both,” and he’s like, “Plato? I’m talking about Sócrates, the way that he stood up to the dictatorship when he could’ve just turned away and kept playing football gave me the courage to leave home and become an artist,” and I think, oh yes we are in Brazil and we are talking about the Brazilian soccer legend, Sócrates, who was also somehow a medical doctor, and then I just say “Bacana” because I remember it means cool, and even though it is not at all the right thing to say in this moment, Francisco smiles and we both realize we’ve been talking for 15 minutes and no one was even in the bathroom. 

I was in high spirits when I returned from this two-week trip to Brazil. I still had almost two more weeks until classes started up again. And most exciting of all, I had found an apartment on Craigslist right across the street from my school for only $225 a month. 

The apartment also had four bedrooms and it was owned by an Argentine in his early 30s named Santino. As with my prior apartment, the best rooms were already taken, leaving me with a room in the middle of the apartment that would definitely not be counted as a bedroom in a Zillow listing. There was no closet and the only window didn’t open to the outside, but instead to the laundry room. There was no way to close this window either, so my roommates could have looked into my room at any time. The apartment also had no A/C and without the benefit of a window to the outside breeze, my room got very toasty in the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere. 

Although only one of my roommates was a native Spanish speaker, Spanish was the lingua franca of the house. Besides Santino and me, there was Claire, a graduate student from the south of England doing fieldwork for her PhD thesis, and Thea, a German working on her master’s degree. 

When I talk with other English speakers about the Spanish language, I often get the comment that Spanish speakers talk rapidly. I think this fails to recognize the variety of Spanish that is spoken in the world and lacks nuance, but let me tell you when it came to Santino this generalization was spot on. This man flew through his sentences. I eventually asked Santino why he spoke so rapidly and he told me that when he was a kid he couldn’t roll his r’s–a crucial skill for speaking Spanish. He was bullied because of this and eventually his parents put him in speech therapy, where he practiced with the intensity of Lionel Messi on the training ground. Speech therapy turned his tongue into a rapid fire machine gun of language, and once Santino felt that power and speed he never turned back. 

I related to Santino’s exaggerated speech because I was doing the same thing, in my own unique way. I went to a performing arts elementary school for acting, music, and dance. While I wasn’t a great child actor, I was a good mimic and especially loved doing an impression of our drama teacher, Mrs. Stevens, who was English. Although I initially found the Argentine accent baffling, it didn’t take me long to internalize its sounds and rhythms. I had been in Argentina for about four months by the time I moved in with Santino, Claire, and Thea, and while I was still making the occasional grammatical error, I was able to do a credible, though exaggerated, impression of the Argentine accent. 

My last months in Argentina passed in a wonderful blur. Most of my study abroad classmates were only doing one semester, so I had an entirely new cast of characters. But I found that, even in the advanced class I had been slotted into, most of my fellow classmates were still more interested in speaking in English outside the classroom. So I focused all my energies on building friendships with my roommates and branching out beyond to create connections with locals. Living my life mostly in Spanish gave me the confidence that I would finally be able to connect with my mom.

Me and my mom

New Recording 121, recorded July 4, 2018. Labeled in my notes as rocking.

Encore

I returned home just before my 21st birthday. After many months spent drinking cheap (bad) beer and cheap (good) wine, I didn’t care about drinking legally in the U.S. What I did care about was talking to my mom. 

Yet despite my optimism and my near-native fluency, when I got home I still found myself unable to bridge the gap between us. Like Roya and Elham, I wanted so much for the world to be the way I thought it should be, for my mom to be able to speak to me unhindered in her native language, to make up for the 15 years of lost life together. And so I was horribly sad when I had to confront the reality that while my mom did speak with more ease and clarity in Spanish, the fact was that she was still missing a large chunk of her brain. Sure, I’d learned a new language, but that didn’t magically restore the cells that had been removed from her brain along with the lesions. The problem was that at 21, I still thought that language was a game of picking the right words. I was certain that the right words were available, if I only searched hard enough. I also believed that those perfect words would deliver me from this painful world–where my mom, the person that I loved the most, was stripped of what I thought was her essence–to an ideal world, where my mom never got sick.

Then one night a decade later in the mountains of Colombia I went outside. The night was cool, but a fire warmed the air. I looked down at the ground and saw, for the first time, that it was alive. Alive like me. And then I looked at the fire and saw, for the first time, that it was alive. Alive like me. And then I looked at the pine trees and saw, for the first time, that they were alive. Alive like me. 

I realized in that moment that I had never truly looked at the world, and that the gap I put between me and my mom was only the most obvious of the countless boundaries I had placed between me and the world. 

And so I turned back to look at the world. To really look at it. To look at it as if everything depended on my looking. I looked so closely that the gap between me and the pine trees disappeared. I looked so closely that the gap between and the fire disappeared. I looked so closely that the game between me and my mom disappeared. 

And finally, after 30 years of pain, everything was whole. 

A wind swept through the pine trees, over the fire, and into my body. I inhaled as it said:

Bienvenido mijo.

1. Karl was actually from Minnesota and of Norwegian descent, but I would just say he was Swedish because he looked Swedish and I lacked the skills to explain the history of Scandinavian migration to the American Midwest.