Oval
If you’ve ever looked into the etymology of translation, you’ll know it comes from the Latin trans (meaning across, or beyond) and latus (meaning carried). Translation, to be carried over or across. If you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language, you’ll be familiar with the practice of procrastination. When you don’t feel lazy, you’ll feel embarrassed. You try to replicate a new accent in an untrained tongue. Locals reassure you that you can just speak English, and you flush. The rules of language learning dictate that you have to be embarrassed first and (maybe) decent later. Intermediate seems miles away (or kilometres, depending on where you’re going), and you have to carry yourself over the distance in little steps.
If you’ve ever been in love (fingers crossed), you might know that all lovers develop their own language. You’d know that each love makes up some new vocabulary and rewrites the rules of their tenses. If you’ve ever fallen out of love (they all fall eventually), you might have wondered what to do with the collected parts, a dictionary full of riddles, devoid of meaning. If you want to peak into mine, just know it’s creased and outdated, I won’t be using it anymore. Feel free to borrow some of my love.
If you opened my dictionary, you’d find no space on the first page. Nicknames and plans cover the maps of our bodies, written in unrecorded colours. It might read like the language developed on its own, sprouted miraculously, but languages need time and space to be carried across families and villages into cities and generations. On the first pages, our dialogue flows fluently, except for when you stutter. You flush; a new language, but you recognise it. We’re discovering something familiar. Our conversation is my mother tongue, a tongue that cradles and carries you forward. The language is barely foetal - still an oval egg, two whipped eggs. I see the gaps in your knowledge. I wonder if I could fill your gaps.
If you flip further along, you might notice paragraphs of space between definitions. That’s because I read your love between the lines. I tried to transcribe your sighs into signs and coughs into clauses. Our diction called for invention, imagination, illusion – whatever you want to call it. The space between the lines is where we used to sit, spreading ourselves across, treating the pages like freshly washed bedsheets, still warm to the touch. We make a bed of the cosmos. We spot constellations in punctuation marks, shape clouds into mirrors, and mould ourselves some stars out of stains. When I tilt my head into the lightly coloured sky, with flecks and crumbs and specks of lightly covered love, I can’t help but translate the empty space into you. It didn’t look so empty. We used to see Eden. But, as you know, they all Fall eventually. We were never stars or planets, certainly not perfect circles. Love and translation are both egg-shaped: a flimsy oval, sketched in quivering lines. Two girls playing house for some time between a moment and a year. I wonder when the egg first started to crack. I wonder when our love started to taste like leftovers.
If you’re more than halfway through, you’ll feel the broken spine of the dictionary. You’ll feel the pages sit complacently, too lazy to move forward. You’ll be fixed in the space between the lines, lines that start to look like walls, space that starts to feel like distance. An open book and blank pages have never felt so claustrophobic. The silence is suffocating. When your legs are stuck and your spine broken, it hurts to carry even just yourself across. Translating always involves at least two languages, at least in theory. The passive voice is misused by you again, while my possessive pronouns ring and sting. A love that is oval, not plural. Translation is lonely work with no prize.
If you skip to the end, you might try to decipher the crossed out numbers on our calendar. When they’re in love they go on dates and make dates up. Our anniversary is still coming up. You didn’t want me to come up. The words that used to belong to us rarely come up anymore. Who knew an anniversary would make for such a useful expiry date (don’t tell me if you knew).
If you learnt how to read between the lines (maybe love taught you), you might recognise that this dictionary is more of a wish-list. Filled to the brim with ‘what-ifs’, because neither of us could cross the space between wish and fulfilment. Our plates are full of loud omissions and hollow promises, and I’m starving for a halved truth. Instead I feasted on rotten eggs, and now I’m sick of translating. I’m an expert in a dead language that withers in the empty space between the lines. There’s a part of you stuck in my teeth - why else do I still pronounce my words in your accent. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my love was lost in translation, you did get your wisdom teeth removed. The stars and sky that sit beyond, they imitate you. Only I won’t cross the space anymore. Our love became too heavy a yolk to carry further. The runny yolk used to flow effortlessly and endlessly. I’m leaving some things out, but you left some things out too, maybe it was the eggs. I don’t think eggs grow mould, but I know they crack. You left some things. Left me, to pick up the freckles of the shells, scattered across unfinished ground. I try to tiptoe past on wonky legs and wobbly limbs, but these eggshells bite. You have no idea how hard it is to clean up egg whites with trembling hands, it all just slips through your fingers. Who ever said that love should be easy? Translation is hard work with a high price.
When your love is finally illegible to me, and I can’t read your handwriting any longer, I will punctuate the dictionary with a peck, reassured that the love I learnt cannot go to waste. I’m burying something familiar. What you call the Fall, I call my birth. I know that the shape of love is malleable, but I’ll miss your oval aftertaste. I might recognise our language from a distance, but I won’t carry my tongue across to yours anymore.
