It is an uncomfortable way to live, to be able to understand yet to lack the means to be understood, to be able to receive, but not to give, to be able to perceive the inside but still be an outsider, desperately pounding on a door you’ve longed to enter for almost a decade.
It is a frustrating way to exist, to love the rich sounds of this language, your ears delighting in the dance of trilled rs and softened consonants, but to find them uncomfortable and awkward on your tongue, your mouth seemingly filled with gravel. And if your mouth is filled with gravel, your brain is like a record player that constantly skips, the possibility of beautiful music constantly mocked by jarring stops and starts. No sooner have you started a sentence then you realize that it will lead to the dead end of your native framework, a constant impediment to truly entering this second language.
You know thousands of words, but it turns out that words are not enough. Knowing how to say “blackmail” and “lisp” and “intangible phenomenon” do nothing to help you break through these invisible barriers. You know that they can be prevailed against, many before you have somehow broken through, but their secret is a mystery. These barriers are abstract and non-quantifiable, and no formulas or textbooks can explain why your heart still races when you enter a produkti, rehearsing over and over in your head the simple words that you learned years ago, “chai chorniy.” You can read Chekhov and understand the rapid speech of news anchors, yet you stand foreign and awkward when someone addresses you on the street, either silent and confused or offering a messy version of the words that you know in theory so well.
You want to know what it feels like to think in this new framework, to walk down the street and realize that your wandering thoughts were actually in the language of this country, but for now, all you can do is wait. All you can do is keep chipping away at the barriers, mouthing the soft “Ls” as you walk to work, forcing yourself to offer conversation when all you want to do is be silent. All you can do is keep pounding on the door steadily, claiming joy in each fragment of paint that you scrape off, with the hope that one day in the not so distant future, you will break down the door and enter.
Hope Unyielding 