Palabras

by Emma Sidnam (New Zealand)

I didn't expect to find Colombia

For 20 years I have carried my body around The blocks, taken it to the dairy around the corner, Sat it through 6 hours of school a day and forced It to play sports that it wasn’t very good at. I’ve gifted my ears with music, my legs With stretches, I’ve let my body sleep and eat and speak with a tongue that I’ve sometimes bragged is abnormally long, but still, that tongue has been mostly stunted, limited to the only tongue I grew up with, that being English. And people often say that the eyes are windows To the soul, but I think that our tongues carry something too. Y en este momento, las palabras fluyen como agua de mi lengua Porque, por dos meses, for two months I walked the streets of a dream, Streets lined with graffiti, I could and would not Forget what that was like. Inside, I was made of wonderment, even the skies Were different, painted in shades different from The skies here. For two months, I let my whole body remain captivated By the oceans of words that is Spanish, by the curves Of consonants in a language that is different, by the Mountains and rivers, the slivers of sounds That we don’t normally hear. And there, in that space between my ears, As the words filled every crack the way a drowning Ship is overcome by water, my brain began To change its encryption. Mi vocabulario en español is two months Thicker, and I am richer and different for it. Because the thing about translation, traducción, Is that the words are never exactly the same, And I think when we translate our days Into new places, we realise that once We start writing our names with New ways of living, we gain Whole other versions of ourselves. We think that we know our minds, Until our lines are in a different script, I had what I thought was my way of life, My manuscript in black and white, But then I had never tried dancing To a different tune. And the truth is, my Spanish language self Is a happier, more open person Than my default. My facial expressions, The pitch of my voice, all my usual worries Seem to melt into noise, when I am Thinking en español, I am a different person. I want to carry my Spanish language self With me even as I travel onwards without travel, and I want to remember that right now, I am only a Version, and I can take excursions from Myself in dreams. I can take my mind For a walk on a leash and see where my Feet will go, clearly I don’t know, in fact, I don’t know what I don’t know, And I’m excited to keep on not knowing, And growing myself in all directions At once. And maybe I’m a cliché, I went somewhere new And found some profound truth, but the truth I state, is It’s more about language and less about the place, It’s more about the way of life and less about the side streets That I discovered. And, therefore, por tanto, I can tap into that new self, With the click of my wrist, With the slip of my tongue into Spanish.