On Love and Langue

My boyfriend and I, we don’t exactly speak the same language. And for once, I am not being hyperbolic.

By profession I am a teacher of English. By birth I am a bibliophile of the first order. I am sensitive and perceptive and have tendencies to overthink that certainly allow me to suss out the nuance of a passage or situation. It also allows me a diagnosis. And a prescription. Any old way, words matter. In 2016, words matter a lot.

But now, this tendency of mine to ponder and parse and analyze is less helpful. Maybe it wasn’t so helpful all along.

My boyfriend, he’s a talker. Even though he knows I only understand about 60 % of what he says on the phone, he still wants to talk, and I feel the same way. Even if I don’t understand the words, I understand his pace, his tone of voice, the way his timbre shifts when he’s tired. Where I once would have pulled an entire conversation into columns of words, words that are friendly or unsure or loving or reticent, I am left with only an echo, an imprint of what was said.

Because when he is looking for words the best word isn’t always available. He’ll lapse, frustrated, into his own language; he’ll choose the closest option. When I am trying to articulate a feeling with idiom (last week it was the impossibility of translating “all worked up”) my best choices include hand gestures and eye rolls and eventually, the grasping of a word that is close, but still not right.

We were talking about the near completion of my second master’s degree the other night. “The only disappointment for me,” he said. I winced, curled up on the couch, squinting my right eye and cheek and corner of my mouth all together. “The only disappointment for me and you,” he tried again, “is that your salary does not reflect the work that you do.” I gave him a pass. I could hear what I would normally say reverberating in my brain: Disappointment? How do YOU get to be disappointed in MY success? Is money really what matters? Are you saying I am a financial liability? But there is no room for that now. I can no longer assume the meaning behind a word, or even the intent. My information comes from elsewhere. I am learning to pay attention to other things.

I am paying attention to things that defy logic and science and definition. To the way four voices fill a house and empty a refrigerator, to the way hope rises; I am paying attention to possibilities and the soft edges of human love.