For once, in English

Less than two weeks before leaving, I realise that I owe some words in other language. For the first time, I know you will read me with no doubts, with no weird internet translations that are able to completely destroy what is written. For almost one year, I struggled to express myself in English exactly as I would do in the language I speak almost since I was born.  That language that has become my job, the same language that allows me to describe the world as I see it,  with all the details, the colors, the smells and with all the mixture of sensations and feelings that become deeply linked with each moment. The same language through which I lived my childhood, I learnt the first songs, the first words. The language that I am able to speak fast, so fast as you do, the language in which I do not mix a ship and a sheep and, for sure, I never mix living and leaving. Indeed, this is the best I have learnt:  to leave and to live. I understood that I had to leave to be able to live more. For a few months, leaving meant getting out of my home. Now, leaving means getting back home. But I know I lived and I know I learnt. How could I ever imagine a sheep swimming in the river with carnations, celebrating a revolution? I had to come here to have this picture in my head. Beyond that, there is one more thing I have learnt: in a different language, maybe you are not exactly the same person. Of course inside it is the same. But what comes out is not: the reactions, the often too-long silence, the wrong tone, the wrong verb tense. Sometimes, that was not me. How many times my 'no' or 'yes' meant 'not now', 'maybe later' or 'I know I won't be able to say exactly exactly what I want to say'. As a special friend told me, 'So it means I met you more vulnerable'. That is true. And if I look back now, I praise every second, every hesitation and everytime I smiled alone after realising what I had said. Maybe the other me would have said more, but for sure would have smiled less. All this to say: thank you.