Speechless Fear

I have been living in this country for three years and I am a coward. These thoughts might not seem connected but I assure you they are. I am a coward because I have yet to speak one word of the language of this country the whole time I have lived here, even though I know all about it by now. I still communicate with signs and signals and in my native language every time I have to speak at all. See what I mean, I am a coward.

I will write in this new language that everyone around me speaks. I can read it, and I do so, I can understand everything that the people around me are saying, I just won’t speak it myself. Sometimes I will say a word or two in private, mostly swear words when things go wrong, but I have yet to speak a word of it in public. It’s just too embarrassing, I look like a foreigner and that’s bad enough, it is even worse to speak and have everyone know just how stupid I sound in the language they are practically born speaking. I would rather be taken for some tourist then to admit that I still sound like such a stumbling fool after having lived in this country for three years. Like I said, I am a coward.

Of course then there’s the question of how I work. The answer is very simple; I work for a company that is based in my country and work purely from home. I mail in everything to them, computers make everything easier too. So you might ask why it is that I stay in another country, where I refuse to speak the language, rather then go back to where my job is and where I would feel more comfortable. That would be a cowards response and that’s what I am, so I couldn’t really say, any more then I could say what caused me to leave my country in the first place. I got the urge to see the world a little more so I packed my bags and moved but just as I moved on that whim I haven’t had the whim to move back yet.

I was walking along the street, on my way to nowhere in particular, when I saw a woman screaming and crying on the riverbank. I looked in the direction she was facing and saw a bobbing speck off in the distance. It took me a moment to realize it was a little boy who had drifted some distance from shore. There was no time for thinking then, my shoes were off in a second and I was in the river. That was a disgusting experience, though happily that wasn’t what was on my mind at the time, the river was not clean in any sense of the word. I was swimming through filth but that consideration would come later, after everything was over.

The boy had been dragged out a long distance by the current of the river but I reached him and he latched on to me. I had been afraid, like the coward I am, that he would be like all of those people I had heard about and drown his rescuer in his panic. He couldn’t have been more then four or five so even if he had panicked I probably could have handled it. I am a very good swimmer, though it sounds weak coming from my mouth. Swimming as far as I had already though I was getting tired, I was starting to realize the magnitude of what I had assigned myself by diving into the river. Now I had a return trip with a burden on my back, an ugly thought but I had no choice.

To be continued...