In Our Language

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the small window that looked out on the narrow street and the building opposite. Nyra was leaning forward, watching me with wide eyes, as if waiting, curious, which she was. She’d never had a friend like me before. 

And I’ll never have a friend like her again.

She looked at me with her big brown eyes and I looked back at her with my small blue ones. 

CURIOUS.

After 12.059 seconds she blinked and said, rather unsurely, “Uh, hi. I’m Nyra.”

I knew who she was before she told me. We know the basic stuff like that when we’re born.

“Hi, I’m Blu.” She knew that, but I’ve been told it’s what you do when you meet someone for the first time. 

As intriguing as Nyra’s eyes were, I couldn’t help looking past her at the window and the haze. Everything in the room was so clear, so sharp. Surely my eyes were completely fine, so why couldn’t I see anything outside the window clearly?

HAZY. UNCLEAR.

Nyra saw that I was distracted and asked what was up.

“Why can’t I see anything outside the window?” I asked her, pointing.

“Oh, that’s because we’ve got heavy fog today. It’s been like that for a week now.”

“Fog?”

“Oh - um, it’s water vapour that’s visible. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly now. Been ages since I studied that sort of stuff.” She half-smiled, hugging herself.

SWEET.

“It’s not always like this, then?” I asked. I could see a faint shape through the haze. Something solid and pink. 

“Oh, no. We only have fog during winters.”

“Winters? What are those?”

Her eyes widened even more. She looked at me for 3.57 seconds, then explained: “It’s a season. We have winters, then spring, then summer, monsoon, autumn, then winter again.” She counted the seasons off on her fingers.

I nodded. Factual information like that is easy to understand and remember.

I looked around the room. Nyra was sitting on a maroon sofa on my right. The window stood opposite me. Beside the window stood a bookshelf. On my left, a heater glowed orange. I stared at it. And shivered.

“Oh, are you cold? I’ll get you a blanket. Wait,” she said, standing up, and walked out of the room.

KIND.

I couldn’t help but notice these things about her, these observations I made with every word she said, every movement she made, and everything that I looked at around me. I was supposed to do that sort of thing. We all are: observe, analyse, conclude.

So far, I’d observed Nyra’s curiosity, and her sweet and kind nature - very basic things that we know when we're born and don't have to be explained - and the fact that I couldn’t see things clearly outside the window and that was because there was a fog and that it only happened during “winters”. There were other seasons too. I remembered their names. I still do. We can do that, you see. Tell us something once, and we’ll always remember it.

She came in carrying a huge, brown blanket. She seemed as if she would collapse under its weight.

“Here,” she said, unfolding the blanket and putting it around me. She leaned over as she adjusted it over my head and then handed both ends to me. I held them close. It suddenly felt warm. And comfortable.

These are strange words, warm and comfortable. I was already warm thanks to the heater and the closed windows, and the chair I was sitting in was pretty comfortable too. However, one word can mean a lot of things to humans. Their language doesn’t work like ours. To me, those 12.059 seconds for which Nyra had looked at me when I was born was just a number, a duration of her stare.

But for Nyra – for later I’d told her how our language and thinking works –it was an indication of curiosity and interest. The numbers, she said, had a deeper meaning. When I’d asked how, she said that she was looking forward to meeting me. She’d never had a friend like me before . She’d never had friends unlike me either. “So I didn’t want to screw up our first meeting, but at the same time, I couldn’t help the curiosity, I think. That must have been it.”

Humans are sometimes unsure, you see. That’s why they say things like, “I think”, “must have”, “might have”, “I’m not sure”, “I don’t really remember”, and so on. Their memories are not like ours. We remember every bit of information that we receive. Humans don’t. Their brains, unlike ours, are very plastic. They have chemicals in their brains. And cells and hormones and things like that. And then you have the surroundings in which they live. All of these things meddle with how they remember information. Their memories, you see, are very fragile. Just like them.

Our memories aren’t, and that’s why they tell us so much. So that even if they forget something, we won’t. That’s why we and humans are very good friends too.

***

“This feels warm,” I said, when she drew back and adjusted our chairs in front of the heater.

“I know! It’s my mother’s. It’s very warm and soft, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said and took to looking around the room again. I was about to ask her something, when she said- 

“Um, I’ll get some cocoa and then maybe” – she played with her fingers - “we can read a book?”

That sounded like a good idea, so I nodded. I’d never read a book before. I really wanted to.

She came back with a mug - I couldn't drink, of course - and pulled out a book from the shelf beside the window. “There’s a really nice story by Bree Lyder. I think you’ll like it.” She sat down in her chair and opened the book. I stared at the browning pages and the black type. Books were pretty rare by then, you see, but Nyra had hundreds of them in her collection, which her grandmother had started almost sixty years ago, she later told me. 

“It’s called Dried Flowers,” she went on. “It’s a really sweet story about family and love. You’ll like it, I think.” The unsurity again. She cleared her throat, took a sip of her cocoa, and started reading.

It was a really good story about a mother, who loved gardening, and her daughter, who tried to tell her pabout her struggles. I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but once Nyra started reading, she did not stop, and I did not interrupt her, because I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

When she was done, the room was quiet. I saw her close the book and look at me. We both looked at each other for 7.132 seconds. Nyra later told me that for her, it was a look of expectation and hope that I’d enjoyed the story as much as she’d thought I would. I told her I had, and that if my look meant anything, it probably was of comprehending something I couldn’t really articulate, a mixture of feelings. At that point, of course, I had no concept of feelings, but I think I was as close to feeling as we are capable of when we are born. 

When those 7.132 seconds were over, I asked a lot of questions – how do flowers work, what is gardening, how could I see things without them being there simply by listening to Nyra’s voice, what mothers are, and how could a mother also be a sister, as was said in the story. Nyra answered all my questions, moving her hands about, taking a sip of cocoa every now and then, her big eyes looking at me and the book and the room and her lap and then back at me.

PATIENCE.

That was my conclusion from my observation and analysis, as I sat there listening to her answers. Behind her, the fog thinned and I could see the building opposite, painted a soft shade of pink. The windows on it were closed and curtained. 

It sounded good, what she said about love and mothers and daughters and sisters. She looked different when she talked about these things, Nyra, although you could only notice the difference if you really looked at her continuously, which I was doing, without realizing it.

Something inside me felt different too. Something wrong. When we'd later sat talking during her last winter, Nyra told me what I was feeling was probably loneliness. Or longing. Or both. Probably; she couldn’t tell, because, as she explained, everyone experiences these things differently, so even if she had been lonely, she couldn’t surely say that what I’d felt in that moment was loneliness too, because we’d both experienced it differently. I wasn’t even a human, to begin with. 

I’d asked her how humans went around when they were so unsure of so many things, unlike us. She said she didn’t know. 

“We just do,” she’d shrugged, and her dark green shawl had slipped off her shoulders. We were both sitting at the same window, looking out at the fog even though that was pretty pointless, because you can’t see much through the haze. 

It was Nyra’s last winter. She knew it. And she wanted to remember everything that had happened in her life, especially in her life with me. She wanted to “relive” the good times, as humans call it - recollecting memories that they mostly do not recall with complete accuracy and building pictures of those memories in their minds. Their brains work like that, you see, and it makes them feel good and bad and sad. It’s called “nostalgia.” Another one of those “feelings.”

I'd reached out and adjusted her shawl back around her, wrapping her comfortably. She was too weak to do it herself. As I did so, she took my hand, and I told her about the first time she’d did so.

It was on that first day, after she’d read me some more stories and answered more of my questions about things like struggle and determination and fear and courage and emptiness and sickness and fantasies and all those human emotions and feelings.

I’d asked her what love was. My memory told me she’d used that word several times while reading out loud the stories and answering my questions and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, or if I’d understood it fully. Yes, I know I said that unlike humans, we are sure about what we know, but you see, son, human emotions are something you can never be sure of.

“Love? Love is a lot of things. It’s between family, and friends, and people, and people and animals. Love is one of the primary emotions we feel. We humans, I mean.” She went on to tell me all that I have told you about love over the years. 

“It sounds nice,” I said, when she finished.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“But I don’t know what it’s like. I mean, I can’t feel it, as you say, can I? I mean, I’m not a human.”

She looked at me–for 16.324 seconds–and then reached out and took my hand in hers. “I’m sure you will.”

No word flashed in front of my eyes then, no KIND or SWEET or CURIOUS. There was a blankness.

My system didn’t know how to process these things. And that, I told Nyra on that day when we sat recounting our lives, was what, in my language, means LOVE.