[Cries in Spanish]

Fluency in weeping.

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I had been studying Spanish alone for a few months when I enrolled at a language school atop a steep hill.

Prior to this the learning had been slow. Alone, I spoke to myself, and half-alone I spoke to my teacher over zoom, and more than alone I spoke to the gamified app on my phone that made me feel like a child. But I still froze when I tried to talk to real, live, in-front-of-your-face people, so the intensive was both necessary and necessarily difficult.

Day one: I opened my mouth to introduce myself to Tabi and started crying. She didn’t ask me what was wrong which was good because I wouldn’t have even known how to explain myself, even in English. Nothing was wrong. I must have just been nervous, I reasoned. It would pass.

Two seasons earlier I’d spent a month at a wri…