I know words. I have the best words.
These, unfortunately, aren’t my words.
Been speaking this language as a foreigner for a while now, 10 years or so, give or take a few. And yet, my delicate attempts to weave them together often end up becoming word salad instead, most likely how this piece is going to turn out. I do like salad though. It was an acquired taste, I must admit.
The good words are elusive – like any good ideas, stories when you need to share them, people, and Chipotle deals – like any good things, you know? They pop up at the most random of times, when you’re least expecting them.
If you don’t already know me, though my name might have given it away, I’m from Nepal. I love the Nepali language; it’s my mother tongue, my default operating system language. I hold it very much dearly.
One morning in the second semester of my freshman year, I woke up with a startling realization – I had been dreaming in English. Not just speaking it with someone, but my entirety inner monologue had unfolded in English. I brushed it off as I hurried myself to class thinking, just a weird dream, it’s no big deal.
…
Morgan Freeman’s voice: it was kind of a big deal.
While my command over the spoken language was still pretty rough around the edges, that day marked the moment I started losing touch with my Nepali words. I’ll admit, I still stumbled over words I didn’t know the English equivalents for, but I had also started casually substituting my Nepali words I used daily with the English ones – even when speaking with my fellow Nepali peers.
It’s all a blur when सिरानी became pillow, पसल turned into store, and चश्मा? What are you on? You mean shades?
I get it. There are words you can’t expect me to trace the lexical roots and find a perfect translation for. Sue me, but you’ll never catch me calling my phone or TV a कर्ण फुसफुस यन्त्र or a दूरदर्शन यन्त्र (yes, those are the real translations. Source: trust me, bro). Even पुस्तकालय feels like a stretch, when library is much easier to say.
Now, multiply this trend by the years I’ve lived like this. What comes out of the other end is the current me – staring blankly at a lamp, stroking my beard for an entire minute, and still not being able to dredge up the word for it in my mother tongue. My mind is on mini-panic mode, every part of it in overdrive, searching for a single word. But all I hear is static. I’ve hit a wall – a moment of pure, existential crisis. I know the lamp is just a lamp, but it’s not just a lamp. I suffocate in the realization that somewhere along the way, a simple word fell through the cracks of the rusty old trunk of vocabulary that I’d tucked away for so long.
Here I am, fumbling in a fog of language, searching for a sense of belonging in words that no longer feel like mine. Caught between languages, I’m torn, unsure of where I truly belong. My own language, the one that I called home, is slipping through my fingers, like a memory I can’t quite grasp. The words that once flowed like a river, effortlessly, now seem distant, foreign. I’m stuck here, in this liminal space, lost between two worlds. And so, I stay adrift, trying to find my way back. Stuck in Duolimbo.