How Lovely it is to be Misunderstood

Leaving your home to find the place you belong to. 

You dive into the adventure. Running into new people, new sceneries, new languages. The grey flats around your house brighten in red colored brick houses, tiny green gardens. Tall blonde giants almost hit you with their bikes, because you are still inexperienced and so, so small. You are even scared to bike alone at night at first. You become a newborn in that new country. Learning everything. From how to talk, understand and come… close. 

Making friends - you guys spend long nights teaching each other swear words in each other’s native tongue. You laugh your heart out when seeing them so focused, trying to say anything in your “unpronounceable” language, as they describe it. You find it amusing repeat some Dutch words when you listen to a strangers’ conversation, like a mocking bird hidden in a tree’s crown. 

Sometimes you forget your vocabulary. The right word is on the tip of your tongue. Ah, you know it in your mother language. How do you explain it? Does your accent sound funny?

But you know these words in your language, of course. You try to explain them to the rest. But they have never heard your grandma yelling from the kitchen. Never read the boring 18th century Balkan poems in school. Never cried to song lyrics in your native tongue, they don’t understand them…

Then you meet a one of your kind. Another soul from your homeland, seeking for a “better” shelter. You find it funny how their words seem clear even in the noise. Words and language make you feel safe. The person is not your loveliest; you are doubting if you would even befriend them back home. The bridge of words between you remains just words. And they don’t stay for long. They blur into the sea of faces down the street.

***

When starting a new life, you draw yourself a new portrait: you paint your laughter with lighter sounds. You sketch your gestures with thicker lines, but gently throw them in the air. You even illustrate yourself with a new nickname. But when you are exhausted from drawing is new persona, you throw away the brushes and the palette in the fading of the day. And right there, in the misty smoke of the evening, you catch someone observing you. Such an unfamiliar-familiar face. It sees your inner colors through the new shades. Reads you, and answers you, without saying a word. You seem to share some language you didn’t know you spoke. You enjoy this misty evening. Suddenly, your accent is beautiful, your past: exotic. You enter someone’s mind whose language you don’t even speak. You leave your footsteps there; you are described with words you cannot pronounce. You begin to live in that foreign language. Maybe you are being understood in that language.

But do you even belong there…?