Lost in Translation

Often, between translations, thoughts are lost. They wander around the darkness, looking in vain, for a way to complete their journey, bouncing from one dark shadow to another. They know they can’t go back home. That door is shut.

I wonder what happens when we speak, you and I, in languages that are bright as sunlight to the speaker, but are foggy and confusing to the listener. What happens to the numerous thoughts that trickle away, misting the surface of the dark canopy of the secret world of our conversations?  Thoughts rising up to the canopy, touching its cold innards, cooling to tear drops, crying in despair and falling as homesick rain that looks to fall in the same pond it evaporated from. The pond is filled with the ripples of our conversations. Drops fall on the glass bangles of the ripples, breaking them with the weight of their loneliness.

And when the pond freezes over, with no more new conversations to keep it warm, the thoughts lost in translation linger on, gliding on the ice, like hockey pucks, moving around here and there, between your frosted lips and my reddened ears. Thoughts getting licked by your tongue and pushed away by my ear, Thoughts persisting like hunger, rumbling like echoes of thunder on a rainless night.

Thoughts lost in translation, that knock the drumming doors of the ear, always trying to reach inand declare their lives complete. Thoughts that want to enter my ear, so you can declare that you have made a goal with the talking hockey stick of your tongue, and cheer in ecstasy.

But no, the defense of my ignorance stands guard, preventing the puck from entering the ear and so the thought remains lost. You can't take it back, having uttered it in your language. So you try to play around, move it every now and then, with your tongue, uttering it in several, but always incomprehensible words, trying determinedly, hoping that the thickness of my ignorance would melt, making way for the vagabond thought to one day reach its destination.

Maybe one day it will. Maybe.