tongues

I thought I'd be good at languages. With a sensitivity for cadence, and rhythms and structures and words, the taste of them. But no. It never came easy. Not even what's supposed to be my mother tongue, mo theanga fein.

And now along with the distance between us, there are unfamiliar words and meanings. It's not easy to stretch my tongue around your syllables, these multiples, they're hard to swallow.

So so much goes unspoken. Written into the pauses and the silences. They're universal, where translation fails.

It will do, perhaps, or have to, until we find another language, and I can learn you a better, more wordless way.