Language Barriers

I promised myself I would never get a divorce.

I lived through a divorce. A ten-year, vicious, tedious war that nobody was able to win. A battle that stationed my father to an unknown land with a family that was foreign to me. Something so brutal that left my mom permanently drawn to the bottom of the bottle. Hours upon hours of shooting back and forth. The bullets always made a roaring noise after being shot; they were so piercingly loud that it was impossible to escape the noise. I grew up in the middle of a battlefield with one side so polluted with dust that I couldn’t see what was real and what wasn’t, but some nights, I preferred the soot in my lungs as opposed to the monsters on the other side.

Once I was old enough to get my escape car, I told myself I would never be on that battlefield again.

When I met you, I realized that life wasn’t limited to the different shades of smoke I witnessed during the war. I didn’t feel stuck anymore, I noticed the world expanded on for thousands and thousands of miles. Everything was indescribably beautiful and intense, and every backdrop I saw with you made me truly believe that I was in a movie.

You showed me that there was a tiger hidden deep inside of my frail body. You taught me about the joys in simplicities – even just from going to the grocery store with you, your hand locked with mine. You pushed me beyond my boundaries – in a good way. I found myself, I found my voice, I found motivation to live. You made me feel beautiful, like all of the girls I would pass by and pray to be like them. You let me roar.

It was perfect. It was beyond perfect, until it wasn’t anymore.

We slowly stopped experiencing the world together. I felt less and less appreciated by you, starting from a physical sense. The more time you spent alone while I was waiting for you in the other room, I began to feel farther and farther away from you. Time went so slow, I felt like I was in another time zone. I was six hours behind you just by being in the kitchen.

I had never experienced this much silence in my life. The only company I had was the ringing in my ears.

I was alone.

My trip to paradise was over, even though you kept saying it wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do. I thought any comment from my end would result on the both of us being thrown into the middle of that fucking field. I didn’t want to spoil the flawless photo of you in my mind, and I didn’t want to destroy all of our beautiful memories.

My only solution was to sit in the middle of the ocean. I was so far away from any living being or creature. It was just me, slowly drifting into the freezing, salty water. My lungs began to feel so full of water that they were going to burst. I couldn’t feel anything anymore, except lust. Lust for my lungs to explode, so I didn’t have to deal with this pressure in my chest anymore.

You saw me starting to drown; I didn’t know if you noticed. After a while, I couldn’t see you well anymore. The water was too murky to make you out, but from what I was able to see, you looked disgusted with me. Like I was a burden.

I didn’t want this. I didn’t want you looking at me like you didn’t love me.

The little energy I had left in me allowed me to burst out of the water, and as I gasped for air, I told you how it felt to run out of oxygen. I told you how much the distance that grew between us broke my heart. I told you how much of a low it is to have been brought to such a physical high, only to be dropped to the ground without warning.

Your answer? You didn’t realize how much you were hurting me. You apologized for not being attentive, and you promised you’d try to be around more. In return, he asked me to try to find passion again in life; it was depressing for him to see my body with a changed, damaged soul. I promised I’d try.

--

Right now, we are taking a walk through the city streets with our hands intertwined. You probably notice how sweaty my palm is, it’s because I’m nervous. You told me you had a surprise for me, and, although I don’t have high expectations, I was also thinking that your surprise would also judge if you were serious or not about saying you would try more.

I feel my heart skip a beat as we step down form the asphalt sidewalk. I’d been so swallowed by my thoughts that I didn’t realize where you were taking me. We were walking into the park in the middle of the city. It’s dusk, so not a lot of people are around besides a few boys skating and a woman jogging alongside the dirt path. You take a turn to the right, we’re walking through the grass and I know exactly where we are heading. In a few moments, we will end up at a small bench surrounded by bushes filled with light pink roses. The excitement and euphoria I’m feeling reminded me of how everything made me so happy when I was six or seven years old, when I thought the only monsters of the world were the ones hiding under the bed or sulking in the closet.

You sit down and pat your hand on the cold, green-painted wooden plank, beckoning me to join you. He flashes me a quick smile as he raises his hand to tuck my hair behind my ear. He lets go of the strand slowly, tickling my chin meanwhile. He stares at me for a moment before speaking up.

“This place was where our life was supposed to start, and I’m sorry it hasn’t been much of a journey.”

I don’t know what to say.

He clears his throat. I can tell that this is awkward for him too.

“Uhm, you know I don’t have that much experience with relationships,” he begins.

I chuckle. “You have more experience than I do.”

With a nervous laugh, he nods. “I know. I know. Still, I just… I don’t know. Things should be equal, you know? We both deserve to get what we want out of this relationship, and I’m sorry that… I don’t know. I’m sorry that I’ve been a pretty boring husband.”

My love has never been one with words, so it is a shock for me to hear him speak like this, so openly, so vividly.

I grab his hands in a whirlwind of emotion. “Please, never say that again. You aren’t boring. I love you. Forever. But, you know, I was just feeling like I was getting tossed to the side.”

He agrees with me with a few vicious nods of the head. “I know, I know.” He lets my hand go and begins to reach into his coat pocket. “Do you remember how I told you I’d show you the world?”

I laugh. “Of course!”

Out from his pocket comes a folded-up piece of paper and a small, dark-gray stone. He places the rock in my hand and scoots away from me a bit and uses the extra space to open up the piece of paper. It’s a map.

“Throw the stone anywhere, and we’ll go.”

I realize in this moment, I can throw my stone anywhere, it doesn’t matter where it ends up. The life that my parents showed me was just simply wrong. Communication goes a long, long way – farther than this stone will ever end up. If I am honest to him, and he is honest to me, I don’t care where we are, I’ll never feel like drowning again. I’ll never feel at war again, since I realize now that I don’t have to live in a world where I choke on lies, where I cry my heart out alone in the middle of the night because I have to remain silent throughout the day.

I know my husband loves me, and I know I love him, but people have different ways of showing their love. I show my love through words, love stories and poems, from cuddles, kisses, and sex. My husband’s love language is through actions, he thinks about me when he’s alone in the store and picks me up something he knows I’m craving. He shows love by constantly asking me what’s next for me, so he knows how to support me in the future and bring me closer to my goals. Language barriers are difficult. There’s lots of misunderstanding and wrong interpretations. Sometimes there’s no direct translations. And sometimes, there are a million ways to say something, just like the phrase “I love you”.