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"Your interview will be at half one," the woman on the other end of the phone said, her voice humorless but still lyrical. "Half one," I repeated in my own lyrical accent, doing my best to infuse it with an air of friendliness and dependability while painstakingly writing it down on the spare sheet of paper I had found. We said our requisite goodbyes and I hung up the phone before my brain short circuited. Half one. In what possible world was that a unit of time? I wrote 1:30? down next to it and thought about all the ways navigating a country where they spoke English slightly differently than I did was more difficult that I had imagined. When I ran downstairs to tell my housemates the good news, their lively chatter stopped as they faced me with bright eyes. The taller one nudged the shorter. "Speak English!" she said to her, and then smiled at me. "Hello baby, how are you?" When I decided to move to Ireland, this island of verdant green and constant rain, it was the first time in my life I was going to a place where I didn't know a single person. Although I had been to visit before, there is of course a difference in roots—where you put them down and cultivate them. In this case I had been putting down roots in Ireland for years, although I didn't know it. From the first trip where I learned the proper response to, "Top of the mornin' to ya," was, "And the rest of the day to yerself!" (although the only place you'll hear this is on a tour bus to Dun Laoghaire driven by an Irishman with a wicked sense of humor, so you're better off never mentioning this fact to anyone) to the trip where my mother tried desperately to matchmake me with any man she caught up in conversation, to the three weeks I had solo traveled and truly fallen in love with the place. With all those trips, all those roots, I had never expected them to lead me here, looking back at my two Chinese housemates who were wondering why I'd come thundering down the stairs to interrupt their conversation. "I got a job interview!" I told them, and they congratulated me in their own lyrical English, not broken but puzzle pieced together with more effort than most put to speaking. Later, at a pub with a pint and someone playing the fiddle in the background, I had another short circuit. "Who?" I asked, and my new friend looked at me curiously. "You know," he said. "Your man. The one with the big hair." "Oh," I laughed, confused. "No, I don't know him." Our conversation was erupted by cheers in reaction to the rugby on the TV in the corner, so I didn't find out until later that "your man" was just "that guy, you know, him over there" and not somebody special to me specifically. I left France to come to Ireland, and I thought it would be easier here, not harder. French is my second language, but my accent is good and people don't always pick up my foreignness in quick conversations. In Ireland, the minute I open my mouth I am marked as different. It comes in a friend who starts to add "y'all" to his vocabulary, another who argues gleefully about what is a chip and what is a crisp. It comes when I water my roots, and when I hear my differences intermingle with all the others, lyrical and sweet. "Speak English!" she'd say, even though my housemates loved to teach me Chinese, always so happy when I remembered something from the night before. "Speak English!" Although her English sounded different from mine sounded different from all the varieties that sung out beyond our door. "Speak English!" This music we make when we go to new places, when we put down roots and write our own lyrics.