Bless Bless

I write this as evening saunters in.

My hand is bent into a soft fist, propping up my chin. To my left is a pot of mint tea, jagged steam rising like a peak into the cafe atmosphere. I will head home soon, to pack. My Icelandic textbook has already been trundled to the new apartment. It’s going to be waiting for me; it’s going to teach me how to breathe.

My journey to Icelandic has coincided with my journey to be a Proper Linguist. Throughout this semester, I’ve been lucky enough to work on an Icelandic project, annotating vowels and having a blast. That project is coming to an end now. The day is settling, the sun is lapsing into that old familiar brag of shadow.

This is what I have left to pack:

The cats. A teapot with an excerpt from King Lear on it. A book of Hebrew verbs. My many copies of World Literature Today. Eighteen months of frustrations, grief, love, tears, suffering, triumph, querying, writing, studying Morphosyntax, falling asleep with a mug of tea cupped in my hands in a way that only grace could have prevented it from tipping over and soaking my sheets. Bless bless to this apartment that I have trodden around for over a year. It’s seen me through quite a bit, but it is going now with the sun. Here, I finished Canis Major. I tried and failed to find it an agent with my feet planted on these cheap linoleum floors. I found a job and some friends. I pinned a poster of Iceland on the wall. This is where I am at now, a sort of demi-Reykjavik.

Icelandic is the second most difficult language I’ve ever studied because there are comparatively few resources and comparatively stubborn numbers of declensions. Someday, if I ever get to actually go, I will say, “Bless bless!” to strangers. For no real reason, really. Just to say that I am someone who is capable of saying goodbye when the occasion calls for it. Someone who knows that it hurts to leave, but that is part of the process. To quote Nietzsche, “The snake that cannot shed its skin must perish.”

I have felt so morose all day for a bevy of reasons that I will not elaborate on here. Some things must be kept private from the blood-shot eyes of the internet, a secluded grief, a pain with a rocky overhang.

In Icelandic, I am learning all about location vocabulary. I will go, go, go. I will know how to flee from one life to the next, I think, from one library to one little bus stop with all the good things that burble inside me. Locative constructions are among my favorite in linguistics because they are dynamic, center our brilliant human minds on something so basic, the act of situating itself in its physical well. In my work with Icelandic vowels, I’m learning all about the weather (this is what the people in the corpus are talking about). It dovetails nicely with my private lessons about the natural world. I can say mountain, fog, smoke, rainfall, even radar.

When I pick myself back up from the wreckage of the day, I’ll go home from this lovely coffee shop and go work on that project for an hour or so. I slide my finger over the keyboard with all the data of the corpus and say, “Bless bless!” Then I’ll try and pronounce the Icelandic word for embassy again. It’s a long one. I’ve got my hook raised to capture it.

Then I’ll pack some more, pat the twin bed that I’ve tossed and turned in for a good chunk of life. The cats like to stare at me with their inquisitive green eyes. They track my pacing as I listen to music and drift around. It’s their dinner time soon. They won’t be forgiving of my tardiness, but that’s fine.

Bless bless.