They say that the more bilingual you are, the more the languages mix and blend and move and shift. Setting out paths across the neural networks of your brain and remapping it's layout as they travel. That the more you live and speak and breathe in one language the further back the other settles, waiting it's turn to surge forward as your tongue slips and stumbles when someone addresses you using it's suddenly new and yet ever familiar sounds. Languages, like children, can wander, following the easiest path forward and through, focusing on mundane details or fixating on that which is not yet understood. Like water, they can slip away unseen, bleeding through cracks and wearing holes in our memory as they wind their way out, ignored, unused, forgotten. The footprints of their existence leaving cluttered marks in the form of an ability to make an odd vowel sound, or better hear and repeat a new and unfamiliar name. Those of us who were bilingual as children whose second language simply vanished before we knew it was gone are left with scattered memories of words and feelings and meaning uttered in no definable identifiable language. A gut feeling about the sense of a word, or it's emotional timbre when we a character utter it in a film or on TV. We cannot define the value of what we have lost, because we do not know it was, or that it has gone.Learning a new second language chases out the last remnants of that first second language from your mind. Grammatical structures you did not know you still remembered blend into those you cannot fathom as you stumble through how to ask for the ketchup. Or to find the bathroom and the bus. Understanding shifts as fluency starts to settle in, the way you feel about what you think is every so slightly different in your first language than in your second. Direct translations begin to lose their meaning as you seek out sentences that hold the same meaning when you mull over them in the part of your brain that deals with colours and song and the openness of the sky. You wonder how you might have phrased it in the lost language as a child, and you choose your words more carefully in your mother tongue, unintentionally more aware of the power language has to define not only what others hear, but how you frame what you think; how you engage with your life. Who you are and why you are that who.
And every once in a great while, at the edge of sleep in a half remembered dream, when you sing under your breath or catch yourself staring off into the distance, you get a glimpse of a tatter of an understanding you once had that has gone. And for that half second, you remember who you might have been, and how you might have known the world. And then it's gone, the new language you are learning surging forward to battle with your mother tongue. The old language, that was once new, skittering into a forgotten pocket, somewhere in the back of your mind, waiting for another reminder and another moment in the sun.
