birdsong

when i was a child, i heard a story about a time before words.

a time when people spoke in birdsong. trills, warbles, winding coos; sounds that curved like wind through reeds. soft, fluid, without the harsh break of consonants or the jarring clang of hard vowels. nothing that could be misheard. no syntax to fail you. just music. just motion. a language that ran through all things. a language you felt in the bones.

now, the world overflows with language. french. spanish. farsi. german. english. hindi. arabic. countless tongues, countless systems — each promising understanding, each offering the illusion of closeness. and yet, i have never felt more voiceless.

language is supposed to bind us together. it should be a bridge, a rope between islands. instead, it’s often a door slammed too fast, a lock we never learned how to pick. i say one thing. you hear another. meanings unravel between us like thread pulled loose from a sleeve.

we mispronounce what matters. we hesitate at the wrong time. we speak too much, or not at all. and something slips. a moment, a look, a closeness. gone. we should have been given something better.

i imagine a world without this failure. where language is not sound or symbol but sensation. not a sentence, but a signal. a hum in the air. a vibration that passes through skin and settles into marrow. meaning not spoken but absorbed. where understanding is a resonance, not a reconstruction maybe then we would stop feeling so stranded. maybe then we would stop calling across the void and hearing only wind in return.

they say that once, biblically, we did speak the same tongue. before babel fractured us. before we scattered. before eden slipped from our reach like something left behind in sleep.

but i think we still remember. in small ways. in silence. in the echo of a song you don’t know but still feel. in the way eyes meet across a café. in the ache that forms when someone turns away just before you speak. in the way language cracks and leaves the truth behind.

i think of this lost language often — in the quiet between thoughts, between breaths. in the fraction of a second when someone reaches for the door and hesitates. in the joke that lands wrong. in the laugh that comes half a beat too late. in the pause that stretches longer than it should, the glance that doesn’t quite meet mine. these are the gaps. the fault lines. the proof that something went missing, long ago.

because what is it to understand?

it is not to hear. not even to listen.

it is to know. to see the unspeakable in someone else and feel the mirror of it in yourself. to recognize the ache you’ve always carried, reflected in another. i think this is why people fall in love, not for beauty or wit or charm, but for that single moment of alignment. the click. the sudden absence of distance.

of course, the moment passes. the spell breaks. but for a while, it was there. and to some, that is enough.

not to me.

i want more. i want a way to speak that doesn’t collapse under its own weight. i want a language that doesn’t falter, doesn’t warp, doesn’t betray what i meant to say. i want words that don’t bruise the meaning they carry. i want to cast something into the world that lands whole. not shattered. not misunderstood.

but then i wonder: if such a language existed, would we still reach the way we do? would we still lean in when someone speaks softly? would we still ache to be known?

maybe this failure is the point. maybe it’s the flaw that keeps us searching. maybe the silence between words is its own kind of language. not the thing itself, but the hunger for it. the reaching. the almost.

maybe that’s all we’ve ever had. and maybe that’s enough.

because sometimes, i see it. in the way a mother murmurs to her child, nothing coherent, just sounds.
and still, the child understands. or two old friends sitting across from each other at a table, saying nothing, but remembering everything. or a hand brushing another in passing — not to say anything, but to say everything.

maybe the language was never gone. just quiet. just unseen.

maybe it transformed into something else. something not meant to be heard. only felt.

maybe that’s what keeps us here. still trying. still speaking. still leaning toward one another, even when the words don’t land.

because the truth is the veil never lifts. the language never arrives. the perfect phrase never forms.

and still, we try.

still, we try.