On Translation

A List of Things I Am Trying Not to Lose

I used to chase fireflies through a small village like I was trying to catch a piece of the dark and keep it lit in my own two hands. Now I run the other way. From the sun, I mean. Let the record show I have always loved what disappears on its own schedule.

My grandmother told me the riverbank outside our house in Ethiopia kept my grandfather’s soul in it, and I didn’t understand her then, the way you don’t understand a door until you’re the one standing on the other side of it, knocking. I think I understand it now. I think some of us just need a place to put the people we can’t carry into the next room.

There is a version of this poem where I tell you about the Pacific at midnight in November, how I talked my friend into the water with me, how the cold found my feet before it found anything else. Joan Mitchell was playing from somewhere on the shore — that voice that sounds like it’s already grieving the song before the song is even over — and I went under. All the way under. My weakest form, I called it. But listen: sometimes the weakest form is just the truest one, the one that isn’t holding anything up for anybody. My friend came up saying I was strong for staying in there and he wasn’t wrong, just early. He didn’t know I’d choose that November over every golden July there ever was. I didn’t know it either, not really, until I was already choosing it.

A friend showed me a poem today where I show up — the song I played, mentioned once, and with my warning folded into the lines: the only person they’d ever play it for again better be the love of their life. So now I’m in conversation with a poem about somebody I’ll never meet, answering lines I wasn’t fully written into, which might be the most honest shape a love letter ever takes, the kind that finds you sideways, the kind you weren’t the point of but get to live inside anyway.

I bought sunglasses today. Yellow-tinted. Through them the whole world looks like it’s already a memory, warm, a little overexposed, the kind of light that makes even a parking lot look like something you’d want to go back to. I am forgetting people. I am forgetting Tuesdays that used to have whole names. So call this what it is: an extremist’s prayer. I am trying to make every single thing my eyes land on beautiful enough to keep, so that maybe, for the first time, I could love a summer instead of just surviving its length.

Years ago I saw a video — one man, his blind friend, a tactics board between them at a Soccer watchparty, and the man pressed his fingers down on the formation slow enough that his friend’s fingers could follow, so that somewhere in that darkness a whole match got to happen twice — once on the screen, once in the hands. I used to hate translating movies for my grandmother, who speaks only Amharic, who would lean toward me in the blue light waiting for the plot to become hers too. I called it work then. I didn’t know I was learning the oldest language there is — the one where you press your fingers down so somebody else doesn’t miss the goal.

Now I spend hours translating whole shows just so we can watch it together, and I watch her face more than I watch the screen, the way it opens like a door that finally remembered it had a person on the other side of it. Now I look for her in the living room on purpose. Now I turn things on hoping she’ll come sit down.

Everything moves too fast. I know. I’m always running somewhere, usually away from the sun. But look at what I’ve collected anyway: a yellow world I’m trying to love before it leaves, a poem I’m in conversation with and will never finish, a friend who still hasn’t told the song to anyone, a grandmother whose eyes I’ve learned to read better than I read subtitles, and the coldest, darkest months of the year, which is where, it turns out, I have always been my strongest —

not despite the cold. Because of what the cold lets me put down.