A woman started speaking French behind me. I was surprised because when she was speaking English to her companion, she had a very Afro-American accent. Yes, I am a little narrow-minded. But apart from that, her voice took me a moment back to a place that I have temporarily tucked away: traveling. In Buenos Aires one of the questions I had for myself was why I travel. I don't think I have held on to a definitive answer, but it seems that my heart always want to travel. I understood much of what she was saying, at least parts that I could hear as she was respectively keeping a low voice. Her voice transformed my current setting to some warm countryside in Southern France, where I was once.
Languages do that to me, especially those I have known for a while, and French I have known since I was a teenager. "To have known" means the same way as to have known someone; I don't claim to know French. Having lived in Southern Switzerland, my only exposure to French immersion, didn't help me gain a firm grasp of the language, though it was three months in an English-speaking finance firm (the only finance experience I had before now). But I don't mean any need to know the language. A language takes my heart to places where its people, its colors, its aromas, bring a unique sort of excitement no other stimulus can offer, not books, not movies (unless the movie is in that foreign language). I don't remember specific places, even though I've traveled to France more than any other country. It is more of an imagination of a general setting. It is a sensation more than a specific piece of memory. It could be the imagery of Italy, of Germany, or of other countries I've been to, whose language I have come into contact with.
I don't say this with any regrets of having chosen a path that won't let me travel for at least a year. True, I will have to take vacations (unlike in the previous job where I could store up immense amount of vacation time from one year to another). I am not looking forward to taking vacations, actually, but rather just working and learning. Nonetheless, I know in my heart there's a patient spot waiting for the next place where I would hear a language, even if it's one I have never come to know even a little.
But knowing a language makes a difference. I don't mean for pragmatic reasons of traveling, not about traveling at all. I mean making a difference in my imagination of the sort I am speaking. Before last semester I didn't know much about Arabic. Now I get excited whenever I see Arabic letters, whether it's Arabic or Urdu (which I know more) or something else using that script. I feel more connected to this spot of my heart because I know more about Arabic, or whatever new language I will learn next.
This was how my morning commute started, if you don't count the rushed walk to the train station. I barely made it to the train, again. With less than two minutes to get from the entrance of the station to its other side where the New York bound train was eager to leave without me. I had less time than I comfortably wanted because I decided to make a chai. It was the first morning chai I made since that disastrous incident that nearly crippled my computer, which now still acts really weird. I didn't know what to do for breakfast, but I was inspired by the poem I wrote before I went to sleep last night (late, again, of course).
Yes, it's the reverse: reality being inspired by my own poem, not writing a poem inspired by reality. Before I went to bed I wanted to write a poem, but not one that was rooted in any negative emotions. Many of my poems, and God knows maybe most of my poems, are inspired by some negative energy; they serve as catharsis, messages to the world, something, to channel out that negative energy. For that reason, a sudden spike in the frequency of poems usually, though not always, indicates something is going wrong. Last night, nearly an hour after my bedtime, I wanted to go to bed with a good poem. I sat there, trying to clear my storm-beaten mind and and soothe my time-beaten heart, and thought about what made me happy. The first thoughts were not nice, and the temptation to complain rose but disappeared quickly. Then I remember making chai. It reminded me of India, the people there. It reminded me of the friends that I loved serving chai to, who would eagerly wait for the brewing to finish. It reminded me, above all, how much I like making food, especially simple food, and food that allows a lot of creativity. So I wrote a poem of making chai as a salute to life, to the beauty of life while I confront its reality of complicated shades. An appreciation for life, not as a gift from God or Mother, but as a making of my own.
Right after I wrote it, the biggest fan of my chai wrote to me. She rarely writes to me, so the surprise was doubly great. She told me how much she appreciated my poem, which she must have read only seconds after I published it. She reminded me how much she appreciated my chai, and by extension, my friendship. She was one of the people who offered to help me during those horrible 24-hours of food poisoning. But what's more, she was the one that spent nearly an hour with me trying to get my car out. Although our friendship, unlike many I have with women, wasn't marred by any complications of romance, we stopped talking for a while once. And because of that break, I have an extra appreciation for how precious she is to me. And for her to show me her appreciation so soon after the publication of my poem reaffirmed my belief in the beauty of friendship.
For a long time, perhaps forever, really, I didn't know how to be friends, not with men, and not with women. When I was a teenager, and before, I had friends, nothing complicated there, then. There was never a need to think about "what is a friend?". When I was even younger, a little boy of peasant and city background, I had girl friends, and I never really thought about them as girls, just friends. But since that first time I sat next to this really cute Puertorican girl in sixth grade, I realized girls would gave me something different than guys had. Things would never be the same since 1984. So it is a little ironic, just a little, that this half-Puertorican girl, not any less cute than the one in that prison of Brooklyn public school, helped show me the beauty of friendship.
In some ways, it's surprising what my journey, or wrestling, with the meaning of friendship with women has illuminated my general relationships with women. For very long time, since perhaps that day I sat next to that girl (her name is Theresa, with an H, as I remember), I think I have just wanted any woman to be my girlfriend. Any would do, it didn't matter if she was unattractive, bad for me, not a good person at all (didn't realize until later that bad women existed), or that I really only gotten along with them as friends. For reasons that would take a book to describe, I just wanted a woman by my side. So the surprising enlightenment is that by learning to be friends with women that are good for me, that are made to be my friends, I now gained a much clearer perspective on which women I want to be friends and which I want to be girlfriends (and which I shouldn't have anything to do with). It's no longer resigning to have all the women I meet being my friends, neither is it like in the past, desperately having each of them being my girlfriend. When we have rationally found a good place, not really a middle-ground, between extremes of life that don't make us happy, I think, we have reached a level of wisdom.
So with this slightly arrogant assessment of my own sagacity, I salute to my friends, especially those who had to put up with this really rough, and still yet terminated, road of discovering the meaning of friendship, of love. And on an equal footing, I salute to languages, especially the English language that allows me to express to my friends, to the world, from my heart, my deepest appreciation and attempted understanding of the love offered.
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