Isn't it amazing how, when you are exposed to multiple languages, it changes the way you think about reality?
I don't even mean when you learn a language well and it starts merging with your native tongue. More like...
...there are so many words for "apple" in this world, but to me the apple's truest name will always be "alma", because my Hungarian grandmother used to make me say it over and over and was sad that I never got the pronunciation exactly right. She was my "nagymama".
The first time I fell in love, it was with a girl of Chinese heritage, which means that, deep in my soul, the sweetest way to say "I love you" is 我愛你, both in Cantonese and Mandarin.
I was around German speakers a lot as a child, and I thought it was very funny that "sorry" was "Entschuldigung", so that's what I think every time I bump into someone on the street. I had a seizure at a hospital once, and when I came to the nurse started asking questions to see if I was all there. She showed me a pen and asked me what it was, and my immediate answer was "Kugelschreiber". She was so confused, but it took me a while to remember the Italian word, because "Kugelschreiber" has always been much more satisfying to think and say than "penna".
My Polish friend says "kurva" every time she swears (which is quite often), and so I have started saying that too.
Although, since I began studying French, my instinctual swear word is a very classy "putain de merde". When I am really happy, I am "aux anges". How are you? "Ça va". There is a game of cards that can be called many things, but to me it's "bataille corse", because I used to play it a lot with a French coworker in Ireland.
When I was little, I played almost every day with a girl who came from Venezuela. We could understand each other just fine, but once she asked me to pass her the "pajaro" and I didn’ get what she was saying. Eventually I understood she meant our Barbie's little blue plastic bird, and not a sparrow, which is what the word sounded like to me. So when I see birds in the trees? "Pajaros en las ramas". I had another friend whose surname was a play on the Spanish word for sunrise, which she was very proud of, and one of my favourite verses by Garcia Lorca is about the "breaking cups of dawn". When I watch the sun rise, the first word that comes to mind is "madrugada".
As a teenager, I read "Poor Folk" by Dostoevsky and there was a letter in which the protagonist wrote to his lover and called her "golubchik". I still think that's the sweetest pet name- along with "honey" in English.
After coming back from Japan, my brother has started slipping idioms in his speech when he is distracted. I couldn't understand them at first, but I thought it endearing, and now "wait a moment" is "chotto matte". He is my "ototo", "little brother".
A Romanian lady helps take care of my grandfather. Ever since I have met her, known her, helped her pick out gifts for the kids that she can see so rarely, taught her recipes and learned recipes frome her, "thank you" to me has become "mulțumesc".
A person I don't know is "ξένος (xénos)", the Greek for "foreigner, stranger", but also "guest, host, friend".
There are many more. I am a mosaic of the voices of the people I have met, the people I have loved. My own language is beautiful and it's home, but even its ancient, melodious poetry is not enough to encompass the beauty and tragedy of this world. And if I dream in English, curse in French, think of my former Christian God with a Hebrew name and of holiness as the prayer in Arabic over my sick bed that fell from the lips of a Malian refugee who had become a family friend, maybe I can come closer to grasp it.
