Something uncomfortable or
Vulnerable. She would text in
A random language.
Her way of hiding her trauma.
Her way of not throwing it
Directly at me.
Sometimes she would text in
Turkish or Spanish.
I had to translate it back to
English to decipher what she
Meant to say.
Sometimes I would reply in
Russian or French to hide
My helplessness to console.
The loss in translation
Didn't matter. Even if I could
Understand half of what she
Wanted to say. It was okay.
Even if she had put things in
Our slang, I wouldn't have
Understood her pain the way
She wanted me to be.
Maybe it was the effort to
Understand her mattered,
More than her pain itself.
Little effort to sneak in another
Language to understand
Each other had some kind of
Intimacy to it.
Maybe our own language
Isn't enough sometimes.
Like home isn't enough and
You gotta climb a
Distant mountain to it sigh off
And understand and convey-
How the trudge is mutual
And you totally empathize.