The Right Words
by Acamea Deadwiler
The weather for us is low hanging fruit. A universal phenomenon we both understand. Only, Julien understands it in Celsius and me in Fahrenheit. Even ramblings about the temperature are sometimes lost in translation. Yet it remains our easiest topic of discussion and so we tap into it almost daily, mainly via text.
“Where is the good weather you promise me?” Julien asks in a message. After I bragged about how the end of February marks the beginning of Spring in Las Vegas, it snowed halfway through the month. Somehow, the weather has gotten worse every day since and he will not let me forget my unfulfilled assurance. “Weather in the world is weird right now!” I text back. “We’ve ruined the planet.”
English is not even my guy’s second language. That space is held by Creole. A native French speaker, he says the two vernaculars share similar semantics that make learning one easier when you know the other.
For us, simple conversation is a drawn-out chore of exaggerated enunciating, pointing, and repeating. We play an endless two-person game of Charades. I cup my hands over my ears. “Do you have headphones?” He drags his hand back and forth against the carpet when he can’t find the word, “vacuum.” Communicating anything of substance feels impossible and I wonder how we might ever create any connection beyond physical.
Our mundane exchanges make me marvel at how we got here, to this place where we bother to search for something to say to one another. Then I remember. The first note he sent me on a dating app was enough to pierce the soft center of our language barrier.
I’m a pastry chef. I don’t know many people here, but I really want to know you.
Julien had lived in the city just a few weeks, after relocating to launch a French pastry shop with fellow citizens from the Island of Martinique. Swiping through his best photos, where he stood a doe-eyed, six-foot-tall pretty boy with glowing butterscotch skin, three vertical lines shaved into the thin ends of his eyebrows, and soft, short curls gelled still atop his head—I was captivated by his candor.
You seem like someone I’d like to know, too. I messaged back.
When we met for lunch on our first date, Julien went to greet me with a kiss on both cheeks. Halfway from one to the other, he stopped. I was facing straight ahead, not cooperating. “Oh sorry,” he said. “In France we do…” I interjected. “Oh! I know!” and turned to present my other cheek.
In person I noticed he had a tiny Tupac-like nose ring. It was just big enough to give him a bit of an edge. Like he was trying to be less beautiful.
Our face-to-face conversation contained more substance, aided by the ability to watch each other’s mouths and incorporate technology. I’d never listened to anyone with such intent. Such patience. Sentences I can say in ten seconds took him an entire minute. He stopped to use Google Translator when he got stuck, put up his forefinger and apologized before pulling out his phone as I awaited the completion of his thought.
Julien says, “make love” instead of “have sex.” He rolls the letter r in his speech and skips h altogether in some words and doesn’t use contractions and of all the voices I’ve heard, his is my favorite.
He doesn’t possess the cultural nuance to play it too cool and says things exactly as they are, conveys feelings exactly as felt. “I was angry but also sad,” he confesses while telling one of his life stories. “Sometimes, I would wake in the morning and there would be little water in my eye. Almost like, how do you say…cry?” he mentions in the middle of another, looking to me for confirmation that he’s using the right words.
His defenselessness compels mine. Beating around the bush will leave him lost. Besides, I wish to be as open with him as he must be with me.
Since our first date, we’ve gotten back to our routine. “It’s supposed to get warmer by the weekend,” I text. “I know your song,” he replies. “It sounds like a remix.”
What does he know about a remix?
It snows again two weeks later. “Such great weather!” Julien texts.
At this point I’m embarrassed as though I were a failing meteorologist. He lets me off the hook, however. Doesn’t harp on the climate not matching its season and instead follows with, “Do you want to eat somewhere with me?”
He invites me inside his apartment after our fancy Italian dinner. “Would you like some tea?” he asks, rummaging through a kitchen cabinet. “I have gotten your favorites. Green tea…mint tea…and lemon ginger.” He turns toward where I’m sitting silent and smiling on the living room couch, and smiles back. We blush, and Julien quickly returns his gaze to the cabinet as though uncomfortable with his own thoughtfulness.
“Lemon ginger,” I answer.
Julien emerges a few minutes later with two small porcelain teacups placed on matching saucers. I watch as he squeezes globs of honey into his Earl Gray, stirs, and adds more. He’s shocked that I take my tea straight but shrugs in a suit yourself manner and drops just a dollop more honey into his.
There’s a Parisian movie he really wants me to watch. “He is like you,” Julien says, pointing at the lead actor before using his index finger to make a scribbling motion across the coffee table. I nod. After the film, he searches online for essays the actor has written in English and sends me links. Only then do I realize he meant the person, not his character, is like me.
The TV screen has gone blank. The last sliver of light in the apartment is erased when I put my cellphone away. It’s late, the quietest time of night. After several cups of warm tea, we are tired.
“Tell me a story,” Julien says while my head rests so heavy on his bare chest that the words vibrate through my left ear. “You tell me a story,” I say. “In French.” He pauses, “But you will not understand.” I encourage him to try me.
“C’est l’histoire d’un petit cochon,” Julien starts, and waits for me to interpret. “Hmmm…” I think before admitting I have no idea what it means. “I said, this is a story about a little pig.” We realize the futility of this activity and surrender our minds to slumber.
As we lay, our bodies intertwined like cornrows transcend dialect. There is no confusion here. He slowly kisses my forehead in three different spots, then my cheek, then my crown. I stroke his face, as hairless and soft as that of any newborn baby. I rub my thumb across his lips and feel him smile. The smallest parts of us, our navels, our toes, lean into one another. This mutual submission speaks more eloquently than our voices ever could.
The next morning, Julien sits at the dining room table preparing a mango tart for breakfast. I walk over to the open patio door and look up at the clouds. “This weekend it’s going to be nice.” He cuts his eyes at me and sucks his teeth. “We will see.” Done slicing the mangos into perfect half-moons, he waves a dismissive hand toward the overcast outside and carries a full bowl into the kitchen.
“No for real this time!” I run up behind Julien and wrap my arms around his waist. He shakes his head, continues kneading dough before asking, “You want to help?” I pour sugar into a pot and place it on the stove, watching for it to melt into syrup.
The cinnamon-covered finished product is delectable. “Mmmmm,” I savor the first flaky bite. “We did it. Good job, chef!” Julien smirks at my absurd use of the term “we.”
I learn the word “raisin” is not part of the French vocabulary. Julien furrows his brows, baffled when I use it. Equally shocked, I explain how raisins come to be. He grabs his phone, pulls up a photo of a grape and shows it to me. “You mean this, becomes this?” He next flashes a purple raisin.
“Yes!” I laugh.
“That is still a grape,” Julien says. “They are both a grape still. Only different.” We take a red grape from the refrigerator, position it on the ledge of his patio, and agree to raise a raisin.
Every few days, Julien sends me pictures of the grape, still plump and firm. “Maybe it needs more sunlight,” I advise. “More heat so it can dry out.” Next time I come over, we gently roll it closer to the patio’s perimeter.
I adore that Julien works to share himself with me. That he trusts me to tell the barber how he’d like his hair cut. I appreciate the lengths he’ll go, the little things he will do to communicate his care. He protects me. Not in the way that he might if he could arrange nouns, verbs, and adjectives well enough to speak on my behalf. But in the way he pulls me back down to the couch and pleads, “You cannot take your car when it is like this,” after I tell him I’m about to drive home in the rain.
Is this enough?
There is so much silence between us. So many moments we run out of things to say or grow exhausted with the slow burn of saying them. We watch movies with subtitles and have brief conversations that take hours and sometimes once it’s my turn to talk, I’ve lost the desire. I think there must be endless thoughts trapped inside our minds.
This is not what I’ve envisioned having with my partner. This simplicity, though sweet. These, limits on language and therefore, understanding.
I ask in a text message, is everything okay? when it feels as though I alone am carrying the weight of our consistent contact. Julien takes more than twenty-four hours to respond. Then, on a day when the sun is signaling summer, and our baby grape has browned and shriveled, he figures out how to formulate two of his most cohesive English sentences in our history.
I cannot love. I don’t feel it inside me.
I want to know, what prompted this proclamation? Was it a general statement or one directed at me, addressing us? Had I missed a cold shoulder, an eyeroll during an embrace, or some sly metaphor, a sign that we had become too much for his heart to hold? I remember Julien telling me he used to be what we in America call a “player.” When I questioned what changed, he shrugged. I wonder now, if the statement should have been in present tense. The French greet each other with kisses, and pardon themselves before leaving a room. They are a polite people. Could it be that my American emotions misinterpreted his use of the verb, “stay?” I want to ask. But I don’t. I can’t, find the words to explain the words clawing at my throat.
Instead, Julien and I exchange a few terse text messages. I type and delete many more, including, bombardement d’amour—the French translation of love bombing. Because he thinks I’m asking him to pretend and I think he’s been pretending all along and neither of us can help the other comprehend the reason, or where we might go from here.
“Where is the good weather you promise me?” Julien asks in a message. After I bragged about how the end of February marks the beginning of Spring in Las Vegas, it snowed halfway through the month. Somehow, the weather has gotten worse every day since and he will not let me forget my unfulfilled assurance. “Weather in the world is weird right now!” I text back. “We’ve ruined the planet.”
English is not even my guy’s second language. That space is held by Creole. A native French speaker, he says the two vernaculars share similar semantics that make learning one easier when you know the other.
For us, simple conversation is a drawn-out chore of exaggerated enunciating, pointing, and repeating. We play an endless two-person game of Charades. I cup my hands over my ears. “Do you have headphones?” He drags his hand back and forth against the carpet when he can’t find the word, “vacuum.” Communicating anything of substance feels impossible and I wonder how we might ever create any connection beyond physical.
Our mundane exchanges make me marvel at how we got here, to this place where we bother to search for something to say to one another. Then I remember. The first note he sent me on a dating app was enough to pierce the soft center of our language barrier.
I’m a pastry chef. I don’t know many people here, but I really want to know you.
Julien had lived in the city just a few weeks, after relocating to launch a French pastry shop with fellow citizens from the Island of Martinique. Swiping through his best photos, where he stood a doe-eyed, six-foot-tall pretty boy with glowing butterscotch skin, three vertical lines shaved into the thin ends of his eyebrows, and soft, short curls gelled still atop his head—I was captivated by his candor.
You seem like someone I’d like to know, too. I messaged back.
When we met for lunch on our first date, Julien went to greet me with a kiss on both cheeks. Halfway from one to the other, he stopped. I was facing straight ahead, not cooperating. “Oh sorry,” he said. “In France we do…” I interjected. “Oh! I know!” and turned to present my other cheek.
In person I noticed he had a tiny Tupac-like nose ring. It was just big enough to give him a bit of an edge. Like he was trying to be less beautiful.
Our face-to-face conversation contained more substance, aided by the ability to watch each other’s mouths and incorporate technology. I’d never listened to anyone with such intent. Such patience. Sentences I can say in ten seconds took him an entire minute. He stopped to use Google Translator when he got stuck, put up his forefinger and apologized before pulling out his phone as I awaited the completion of his thought.
Julien says, “make love” instead of “have sex.” He rolls the letter r in his speech and skips h altogether in some words and doesn’t use contractions and of all the voices I’ve heard, his is my favorite.
He doesn’t possess the cultural nuance to play it too cool and says things exactly as they are, conveys feelings exactly as felt. “I was angry but also sad,” he confesses while telling one of his life stories. “Sometimes, I would wake in the morning and there would be little water in my eye. Almost like, how do you say…cry?” he mentions in the middle of another, looking to me for confirmation that he’s using the right words.
His defenselessness compels mine. Beating around the bush will leave him lost. Besides, I wish to be as open with him as he must be with me.
Since our first date, we’ve gotten back to our routine. “It’s supposed to get warmer by the weekend,” I text. “I know your song,” he replies. “It sounds like a remix.”
What does he know about a remix?
It snows again two weeks later. “Such great weather!” Julien texts.
At this point I’m embarrassed as though I were a failing meteorologist. He lets me off the hook, however. Doesn’t harp on the climate not matching its season and instead follows with, “Do you want to eat somewhere with me?”
He invites me inside his apartment after our fancy Italian dinner. “Would you like some tea?” he asks, rummaging through a kitchen cabinet. “I have gotten your favorites. Green tea…mint tea…and lemon ginger.” He turns toward where I’m sitting silent and smiling on the living room couch, and smiles back. We blush, and Julien quickly returns his gaze to the cabinet as though uncomfortable with his own thoughtfulness.
“Lemon ginger,” I answer.
Julien emerges a few minutes later with two small porcelain teacups placed on matching saucers. I watch as he squeezes globs of honey into his Earl Gray, stirs, and adds more. He’s shocked that I take my tea straight but shrugs in a suit yourself manner and drops just a dollop more honey into his.
There’s a Parisian movie he really wants me to watch. “He is like you,” Julien says, pointing at the lead actor before using his index finger to make a scribbling motion across the coffee table. I nod. After the film, he searches online for essays the actor has written in English and sends me links. Only then do I realize he meant the person, not his character, is like me.
The TV screen has gone blank. The last sliver of light in the apartment is erased when I put my cellphone away. It’s late, the quietest time of night. After several cups of warm tea, we are tired.
“Tell me a story,” Julien says while my head rests so heavy on his bare chest that the words vibrate through my left ear. “You tell me a story,” I say. “In French.” He pauses, “But you will not understand.” I encourage him to try me.
“C’est l’histoire d’un petit cochon,” Julien starts, and waits for me to interpret. “Hmmm…” I think before admitting I have no idea what it means. “I said, this is a story about a little pig.” We realize the futility of this activity and surrender our minds to slumber.
As we lay, our bodies intertwined like cornrows transcend dialect. There is no confusion here. He slowly kisses my forehead in three different spots, then my cheek, then my crown. I stroke his face, as hairless and soft as that of any newborn baby. I rub my thumb across his lips and feel him smile. The smallest parts of us, our navels, our toes, lean into one another. This mutual submission speaks more eloquently than our voices ever could.
The next morning, Julien sits at the dining room table preparing a mango tart for breakfast. I walk over to the open patio door and look up at the clouds. “This weekend it’s going to be nice.” He cuts his eyes at me and sucks his teeth. “We will see.” Done slicing the mangos into perfect half-moons, he waves a dismissive hand toward the overcast outside and carries a full bowl into the kitchen.
“No for real this time!” I run up behind Julien and wrap my arms around his waist. He shakes his head, continues kneading dough before asking, “You want to help?” I pour sugar into a pot and place it on the stove, watching for it to melt into syrup.
The cinnamon-covered finished product is delectable. “Mmmmm,” I savor the first flaky bite. “We did it. Good job, chef!” Julien smirks at my absurd use of the term “we.”
I learn the word “raisin” is not part of the French vocabulary. Julien furrows his brows, baffled when I use it. Equally shocked, I explain how raisins come to be. He grabs his phone, pulls up a photo of a grape and shows it to me. “You mean this, becomes this?” He next flashes a purple raisin.
“Yes!” I laugh.
“That is still a grape,” Julien says. “They are both a grape still. Only different.” We take a red grape from the refrigerator, position it on the ledge of his patio, and agree to raise a raisin.
Every few days, Julien sends me pictures of the grape, still plump and firm. “Maybe it needs more sunlight,” I advise. “More heat so it can dry out.” Next time I come over, we gently roll it closer to the patio’s perimeter.
I adore that Julien works to share himself with me. That he trusts me to tell the barber how he’d like his hair cut. I appreciate the lengths he’ll go, the little things he will do to communicate his care. He protects me. Not in the way that he might if he could arrange nouns, verbs, and adjectives well enough to speak on my behalf. But in the way he pulls me back down to the couch and pleads, “You cannot take your car when it is like this,” after I tell him I’m about to drive home in the rain.
Is this enough?
There is so much silence between us. So many moments we run out of things to say or grow exhausted with the slow burn of saying them. We watch movies with subtitles and have brief conversations that take hours and sometimes once it’s my turn to talk, I’ve lost the desire. I think there must be endless thoughts trapped inside our minds.
This is not what I’ve envisioned having with my partner. This simplicity, though sweet. These, limits on language and therefore, understanding.
I ask in a text message, is everything okay? when it feels as though I alone am carrying the weight of our consistent contact. Julien takes more than twenty-four hours to respond. Then, on a day when the sun is signaling summer, and our baby grape has browned and shriveled, he figures out how to formulate two of his most cohesive English sentences in our history.
I cannot love. I don’t feel it inside me.
I want to know, what prompted this proclamation? Was it a general statement or one directed at me, addressing us? Had I missed a cold shoulder, an eyeroll during an embrace, or some sly metaphor, a sign that we had become too much for his heart to hold? I remember Julien telling me he used to be what we in America call a “player.” When I questioned what changed, he shrugged. I wonder now, if the statement should have been in present tense. The French greet each other with kisses, and pardon themselves before leaving a room. They are a polite people. Could it be that my American emotions misinterpreted his use of the verb, “stay?” I want to ask. But I don’t. I can’t, find the words to explain the words clawing at my throat.
Instead, Julien and I exchange a few terse text messages. I type and delete many more, including, bombardement d’amour—the French translation of love bombing. Because he thinks I’m asking him to pretend and I think he’s been pretending all along and neither of us can help the other comprehend the reason, or where we might go from here.