Broken English

The following is a freewrite that started as a status:

In discussing whether or not I should use "who's" or "whose" with a friend, I was reminded that English is one of the most difficult languages to exist. Many people have the tendency to think other languages are hard because for many of us, English was our first language, or a language spoken growing up. 

 The reality is that the pronunciations, spelling, and grammatical rules are complex and inconsistent. In 23 years of learning English, I still feel like we're just acquaintances some days. I don't know her as well as I thought I did.

English sometimes feels like a verbal triathalon. It sometimes feels like warmth has to crawl on it's belly through a Sahara of syntax to make it's presence known. It sometimes feels like a ton is attached to the tongue, and communication sounds heavy. Try talking when your tongue has become an anchor. 

Imagine adjusting from the floating fluidity of Italian, or sweet serenade of Zulu, or the dynamic dance of Spanish to the complicated confines of English. It's like telling a dancer she works best at a desk. It's easy to make French sound beautiful and romantic, each syllable is a love story. 

It takes extra effort to make English sound less than computerized and mechanic, 

especially in a society where we try to access love through computers

where we treat people like machines, and emotions like disease, 

where nuance has become a nuisance and intimacy is obsolete.

This is why it is considered a foreign language...it is just as distant poetically as it is geographically.

This is why we love accents.

 They melt the edges off the ice that come with English. They make it warm enough to forget the cold, but not hot enough to change it. Make us forget it's hardened tones before we remember that an accent is simply a heated blanket, and our language still has the bite of winter.

When you grow up loving in another language, she loves you back openly, invitingly, completely. You hear her sprinting through sound waves to touch you. She has cultivated culture in the cadence of hello, and makes greetings sound like romance.

But English is like a hardened woman. English keeps rigid barriers around her heart and you have to work with sweat on brow, back breaking effort to make her stoic face smile, and even then you wonder if it is real. English has been abused, and she sometimes feels cliche. Familiar, but empty. Most give up on her, defeated by her difficulty. People don't like when their words sound like kissing steel, so they settle for a diluted version of her. English won't embrace you like Creole will. She may not even be able to love you back being broken the way she's been. But you still try.

This is one of the reasons why I have such admiration for people who speak multiple languages fluently, or people who did not speak English natively and learned in adulthood. The free flying color that dripped from lips now sounds like black and white ink. Sometimes feels like a monochromatic heartbeat trying to sound like a rainbow again. 

But this is also why I love poets. They make paintings out of water and use their hearts to add color. They mold audible masterpieces out of linguistic concrete. They make English sound like a sunset mid August, where sand kisses ocean and we feel as infinite as she, both of us bodies of water. 

Thank you for the challenge, God. Of being born word lover in New York instead of Venice, or Johannesburg, or Brazil. I know all I have in my arsenal are a pen and a voice box, but I don't mind working a little harder to make Monday sentences sound like sonnets on a Sunday morning. I don't mind finding ten thousand ways to say I love you in a language that only has one word for love.

 I don't mind loving a broken woman.