An Open Letter to my Italians...
On the things I haven't said
I'm Trula, and I'm seventeen years old. But you've probably never heard a seventeen year old Trula speak. If you've known me from the beginning, then you probably first heard the voice of a two year old Trula....but not a two year old who babbles endlessly about the newness of the world...more like a seventeen year old's mind...knowledge and awareness, fears and anxieties, somehow trying to express itself through the vocabulary of a two year old. I hope that today my speech could maybe pass as that of a five or six year old, but I know that I still by no means speak my age.
Is it funny to watch the voice of a toddler come out of a teenager? Is it difficult not to snicker as I use the wrong verb tense, flail in a sea of prepositions, and use ten hastily gathered words in a last-chance attempt to express one word that I don't know? I know that it must be tiring, wading through my swamp of ill pronounced, or even nonexistent words and terribly constructed phrases, and I wonder how many times I have spoken, believing that I am communicating one thing when in reality, I have said something completely different. I wonder how many absolutely bizarre things you think about me as a result of these misunderstandings.
To those of you who still try, for some reason, to talk to and treat me like the seventeen year old that I am, I wish you could know just how much it means to me. I wish you could know how important your willingness to grab lunch, coffee, or gelato, or even just converse with me, is.....it's not effort free by any stretch of the imagination for me, and I know that it's not effort free for you either, but your decision to try anyway has truly changed this year, and my life. I wish you could know how much you are appreciated, and I wish that I could tell you all of the things that I want to be able to say to you...
I wish I could better show you my sense of humor, my sarcasm, my snide remarks, my witty responses. I wish I could talk to you using the perfect words, implying subtle meanings, twisting grammar and structure, metaphor and meaning, playing with delicately placed words until they work together to say exactly what I mean......It's an art form that I never realized the existence of, let alone the importance of.....until I was suddenly left with that crappy dollar store kiddie art kit, instead of the beautiful colors and brushes and techniques that I have curated over the span of seventeen years.
There are days when I'm ready to give up....when I simply cannot bring myself to try to sharpen that stupid colored pencil that is so cheap that it breaks every time it's almost sharp, and then to try to use it to color on paper so thin that it tears if I mess up and try to erase my mistakes. There are days when it seems impossible to express how I feel in a language that I cannot yet call my own, when I am ashamed of every sound that comes off of my tongue, when my embarrassment at the inadequacy of my own words brings me to tears, and I turn away from my feeble attempts at communication, giving into the humiliation stinging my eyes. Enough. Basta.
Many adults that I’ve talked to, especially in the world of exchange, have a tendency to sing the praises of intercultural relationships.....they smother our fears about language-related difficulties with some sort of "small world" rhetoric. "Despite the different cultures and languages of the world, we're all fundamentally the same....we're all humans", they say. "The relationships that you can form with people despite a language barrier can be absolutely incredible", they like to tell us. I'm not saying that there isn't some truth to this, as I am unbelievably impressed and grateful for some of my strictly Italian-speaking relationships. However, the truth is, it is no coincidence that the two Italians that I am by far the closest with, are two girls that I have the ability to speak fluent English with. It's not that I don't ever speak Italian with them, but the unfortunate reality is that it is very, very difficult to get past a certain point in a friendship without certain language constructions. I'm sure that this sounds cold, but the next time you get together with a friend and have a multiple hour conversation, try having that conversation with words that are always used 100% literally.....a conversation without sarcasm, a conversation in which at least a third of your responses, topics, or remarks(anything that goes beyond the everyday scope of casual conversation) are cancelled in your head before they ever come off of your tongue, and you have to scramble to find suitable replacements before their absence becomes evident. A conversation in this fashion not only is exhausting, but also gets very boring very quickly.
It's the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher.....the subject matter is fundamentally the same, but one makes you like the material, the other makes you hate it. One you request for the next year of study, the other you pray that you will never have again. The native language conversation is at-ease, fun, enjoyable.....and makes you want to see that person again, to get to know them better. The conversation with the language barrier can become, all too quickly, a discourse riddled with awkward pauses and mishaps, a tiring affair which, if stretched any longer than the normal time limits of casual conversation, makes you suddenly remember that "really important appointment" that you suddenly need to get to, and you put that person on a mental list of "casually be busy next time in order to avoid her" people.
But that's where you come in.....because despite all of this, you're still there. You are there to remind me that, after several weeks of not seeing each other, you think that my Italian has gotten a little bit better. You are there, backing me up when I slowly try a word that I'm not sure if I've heard somewhere or just made up, when I mistakenly use a verb that sounds very similar to my intended one, but has a very different meaning. Most importantly, you're simply there as a friend, and I'm truly sorry that in exchange for your extraordinary patience and kindness, you hear only a shadow of the things that I want to tell you. I don't know if the Trula that you've gotten to know is a compromised one, or just a different one altogether......and although my criticizing mind tells me that it's definitely the former, I have to hope that maybe it's a bit of both.
But I know that those of you who I truly want to tell this to won't read this. Or maybe you'll try, but you won't fully understand. Because the terrible irony is that the very people who this is written for likely cannot understand this level of English, and it is precisely this level of English that I simply cannot translate into Italian. So I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that I might not ever be able to tell you, and you might not ever know. But I hope someday, somehow, we'll talk without the barriers.
~Trula
